Rational argument, rational inference

Rational argument, rational inference

Reasoning researchers within cognitive psychology have spent decades examining the extent to which human inference measures up to normative standards. Work here has been dominated by logic, but logic has little to say about most everyday, informal arguments. Empirical work on argumentation within psychology and education has studied the development and improvement of argumentation skills, but h...

Inference and Rational Commitment

What is it that explains the rationality of transitions in thought? It is natural to think that any such explanation will need to advert to at least two interrelated issues. The first has to do with what is constitutive of the validity of a transition, and the second with our actual practice of making inferential transitions. Many accounts attempt to deal with both issues simultaneously by show...

Rational Actors , Political Argument , and Democratic Deliberation

Rational inference of relative preferences

Statistical decision theory axiomatically assumes that the relative desirability of different options that humans perceive is well described by assigning them optionspecific scalar utility functions. However, this assumption is refuted by observed human behavior, including studies wherein preferences have been shown to change systematically simply through variation in the set of choice options ...

Belief Revision and Rational Inference

The (extended) AGM postulates for belief revision seem to deal with the revision of a given theory K by an arbitrary formula φ, but not to constrain the revisions of two different theories by the same formula. A new postulate is proposed and compared with other similar postulates that have been proposed in the literature. The AGM revisions that satisfy this new postulate stand in one-to-one cor...