Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology. Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve (...) their reasoning by relying on Statistical Prediction Rules. They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It identifies three challenges that remain in the construction of a naturalistic epistemology. First, an effective epistemology needs to continue to discover handy new heuristics that help us reason reliably about significant matters. Second, we need to identify with more effectiveness what is involved in human well-being. A third project essential to the development of a prescriptive, reason-guiding epistemology is social epistemology.

Psychiatric diagnosis and prognosis is fraught with important philosophical and conceptual problems. This chapter focuses on some epistemological issues and moral issues that arise in contemporary psychiatric practice. It examines various clinical and actuarial techniques for psychiatric diagnosis, ordered very loosely in terms of how "structured" or "automated" they are. The chapter makes the case for assessing psychiatric treatments with controlled experiments, raises several epistemological dangers that arise from relying on uncontrolled investigations, and considers some of the unique methodological and (...) ethical issues that arise when trying to assess talk therapy. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the three central features of the epistemological framework that guides the prescriptions of Ameliorative Psychology. It is argued that this framework offers a new way to think about applied epistemology. In particular, it suggests that there are four and only four ways for people to improve their reasoning.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the subsequent chapters in this book which will discuss topics such as epistemological theory, Statistical Prediction Rules, Strategic Reliabilism, and Standard Analytic Epistemology.

This chapter begins by giving two reasons as to why epistemology is important: epistemology guides reasoning, and people don't fully appreciate the risks and dangers of poor reasoning the importance of epistemology. It then introduces the basic motives and methods of the epistemology developed in the book. Topics covered include the standard analytic approach to epistemology, the philosophy of science approach to epistemology, the theories generated by the two approaches, and whether scientific investigation into normative epistemology possible.

This chapter uses Strategic Reliabilism to resolve two debates about whether certain experimental findings demonstrate deep and systematic failures of human reasoning. It illustrates one of the main benefits of the current approach to epistemology: it can be used to adjudicate disputes that arise in psychology that are, at bottom, normative epistemological disputes about the nature of good reasoning.

This chapter attempts to consolidate some of the lessons of Ameliorative Psychology with some handy heuristics and illustrative injunctions. It explores the empirical research that shows how to enhance the accuracy of diagnostic reasoning, reduce overconfidence, avoid the regression fallacy, improve policy assessments, and restrain the unbridled story-telling surrounding rare or unusual events. For problems tractable to voluntary reasoning strategies, the simple strategies recommended in the chapter can improve reasoning at low cost and high fidelity.

This chapter offers a framework for understanding significance that tolerates our incomplete knowledge of the conditions for human well-being. Topics discussed include the role of significance in Strategic Reliabilism, a reason-based approach to significance, and the potential unavailability of objective reasons. It is argued that a proper understanding of the notion of epistemic significance is a core problem for any epistemological theory that claims to be able to guide reason, and that any epistemological view that gives a central place to (...) the notion of significance is bound to be deeply empirical. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Strategic Reliabilism. The epistemological theory underlying Ameliorative Psychology is a view called Strategic Reliabilism: Epistemic excellence involves the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to robustly reliable reasoning strategies applied to significant problems. Strategic Reliabilism gives a systematic voice and a theoretical foundation to the long-standing success of SPRs while at the same time avoiding the most serious objections to traditional process reliabilism.

Strategic Reliabilism addresses resource allocation considerations within a cost-benefit framework. However, there are serious reasons to worry about the feasibility of a cost-benefit approach to epistemology. First, there are serious general objections to cost-benefit analyses; and second, it is not clear how we can identify the costs and benefits of reasoning. This chapter addresses these two concerns. It is argued that although many of the deep general concerns about cost-benefit analysis are legitimate, flawed cost-benefit analyses can be very useful, especially (...) if we are clear about the ways in which such analyses are flawed. It is further argued that there are measurable proxies for the costs and benefits of reasoning we can employ in a cost-benefit approach to epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Statistical Prediction Rules and provides an explanation for their success. SPRs are simple, formal rules that have been shown to be typically more reliable, than the predictions of human experts on a wide variety of problems. Based on testable results, psychology can make normative recommendations about how we ought to reason. The branches of psychology that provide normative recommendations are dubbed as ‘Ameliorative Psychology’. Two central lessons of Ameliorative Psychology are that when it comes to social judgment, (...) proper unit weight models outperform humans in terms of reliability and improper unit weight models often perform nearly as well as proper models and therefore better than humans. It is argued that the reason people resist this ‘practical conclusion’ is partly because the SPR results are noxious to our conception of ourselves as good reasoners. Further, they undermine our hope — so evident in the a priorism of so much contemporary epistemology — that we can be experts at recognizing good reasoning without massive empirical aid. (shrink)

This chapter compares the authors' naturalistic approach to epistemology to that of SAE. It is argued that the theories of SAE are structurally analogous to the naturalistic approach — they have at their core a descriptive theory, and from that descriptive theory, proponents of SAE draw normative, epistemological prescriptions. The prospects for the theories of SAE overcoming the is-ought gap are not good. The chapter also argues for the superiority of Strategic Reliabilism over any extant theory of Standard Analytic Epistemology.

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and contextualism. While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, (...) an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially prescriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative prescriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. Our main goal in this paper is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views (...) about what is involved in understanding, explanation, good reasoning, and about how we ought to do philosophy of science. (shrink)

Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behind SR is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion (...) to significant, true beliefs. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways. First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge – a theory of epistemically worthy belief. Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. If SR makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions. (shrink)

A person making normative judgments can do so from the perspective of a Judge or a Coach. If you're a Judge, you seek to assign responsibility. If you're a Coach, you seek to improve an agent's performance. While there is a place for being sometimes a Judge and sometimes a Coach, no one should always be a Judge. It is a small and mean person who only wags a finger and never lends a hand. The same is true for a (...) normative discipline like epistemology. A good coach gives useful advice. Advice is useful when it suggests that you modify something you can directly control. And because we are typically unable to directly control our beliefs, a good epistemological coach will have no use for a theory that tells us what an epistemologically good belief is, such as a theory of knowledge or justification. But we are capable of changing many of the ways we reason about the world. Otherwise, what's an education good for? And so a good epistemological coach needs a theory of what makes reasoning epistemically good. What sort of theory of good reasoning would a good epistemological coach employ in order to provide useful guidance for real people? We argue for a middle path between a pure reliablist theory of good reasoning and a pure pragmatic theory of good reasoning. The best theory for an epistemological coach, the theory that will yield the most effective advice, is a mongrel theory that identifies good reasoning with reasoning that achieves an adroit combination of reliabilist accuracy and pragmatic efficiency. (shrink)

J.D. Trout and I started this project in 2000. Our goal was to write a book that was interesting, opinionated, accessible, and fun to read. Here are some excerpts from the first two pages of chapter 1: Excerpts [pdf] . The cover photo is a still of the great Buster Keaton from his movie, The General.

Recently, Rueger and Sharp (1996) and Koperski (1998) have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods allow for reliable inference from data. We provide a framework and an example of this approach.

Michael Bishop and J.D.Trout have recently argued that analytic epistemology is incapable of incorporating insights from experimental psychology, and that while an acceptable epistemology should be normative, analytic epistemology lacks normativity. For these reasons, they urge that analytic epistemology should be replaced by what they call “ameliorative psychology”: a view that draws on empirical findings in psychology in order to help people become better reasoners. In this paper, I argue that analytic epistemology does not need to be (...) replaced, as it is indeed normative, and is quite capable of incorporating the insights of ameliorative psychology. (shrink)

In this essay Juho Ritola develops a justificationist approach to social epistemology, which holds that normatively satisfactory social processes pertaining to the acquisition, storage, dissemination, and use of knowledge must be evidence-based processes that include appropriate reflective attitudes by the relevant agents and, consequently, the relevant institutions. This implies that the teaching of critical thinking and reasoning in general should strive to bring about such attitudes in students. Ritola begins by sketching a justificationist approach and defending it on a general (...) level against the criticism posed by Alvin Goldman. He then defends it on the level of individual reasoners against the argument set out by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout. Based on empirical evidence, Bishop and Trout argue that the kind of reflection advocated by a justificationist approach to reasoning leads to worse outcomes than the use of various statistical prediction rules. Ritola, in contrast, maintains that one cannot and should not replace critical reflection on evidence by a mechanical application of rules. Instead, he asserts, statistical prediction rules and empirical evidence regarding our reasoning performance are part of the total evidence that we should reflect on in our critical reasoning. (shrink)

In their recent book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout have challenged Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) in all its guises and have endorsed a version of the "replacement thesis"--proponents of which aim at replacing the standard questions of SAE with psychological questions. In this article I argue that Bishop and Trout offer an incomplete epistemology that, as formulated, cannot address many of the core issues that motivate interest in epistemological (...) questions to begin with, and so is not a fit replacement. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

I am grateful to the commentators, for their kind words and for their probing challenges. They range in the views they express, from those who seem to think I have not gone far enough in questioning the value of autonomy to those who think I have not challenged it at all. Given this diversity, it seems best to address their remarks sequentially.J D Trout is sympathetic to my project, and highlights his own work which supports it.1 Indeed, Trout's (...) work—together with Michael Bishop and his own stand-alone writing—was an important influence on the views I advanced in the original paper. Unsurprisingly, given the influence his views have had on mine, I find little to disagree with in Bishop's proposals. What I find most useful in his commentary is his insistence that, given the data about human decision-making, some aspect of autonomy is threatened no matter what approach we take. As he points out, while policies that ‘depreciate a person's momentary wish’ might be seen as threatening some aspect of autonomy, policies that allow for unconstrained choice show at least an equal degree of ‘contempt for autonomy’ by making it probable that the agent makes a choice that she regrets because it is not in accordance with her own values. In the original paper I had argued that properly understood, autonomy supports policies that provide soft constraints on choice—constraints that steer and nudge, but which do not prevent the agent who insists on a particular course of action from taking it. Bishop may be right in suggesting that autonomy is not …. (shrink)

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...) the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

Philosophers agree that scientific explanations aim to produce understanding, and that good ones succeed in this aim. But few seriously consider what understanding is, or what the cues are when we have it. If it is a psychological state or process, describing its specific nature is the job of psychological theorizing. This article examines the role of understanding in scientific explanation. It warns that the seductive, phenomenological sense of understanding is often, but mistakenly, viewed as a cue of genuine understanding. (...) The article closes with a discussion of several new paths of research that tie the psychology of scientific explanation to cognate notions of learning, testimony, and understanding. (shrink)

(2002). Philosophy of Science 72 (January), 198-208.

A fresh, daring, and genuine alternative to the traditional story of scientific progress Explaining the world around us, and the life within it, is one of the most uniquely human drives, and the most celebrated activity of science. Good explanations are what provide accurate causal accounts of the things we wonder at, but explanation's earthly origins haven't grounded it: we have used it to account for the grandest and most wondrous mysteries in the natural world. Explanations give us a sense (...) of understanding, but an explanation that feels right doesn't mean it is true. For every true explanation, there is a false one that feels just as good. A good theory's explanations, though, have a much easier path to truth. This push for good explanations elevated science from medieval alchemy to electro-chemistry, or a pre-inertial physics to the forces underlying nanoparticles. And though the attempt to explain has existed as long as we have been able to wonder, a science timeline from pre-history to the present will reveal a steep curve of theoretical discovery that explodes around 1600, primarily in the West. Ranging over neuroscience, psychology, history, and policy, Wondrous Truths answers two fundamental questions-Why did science progress in the West? And why so quickly? J.D. Trout's answers are surprising. His central idea is that Western science rose above all others because it hit upon successive theories that were approximately true through an awkward assortment of accident and luck, geography and personal idiosyncrasy. Of course, intellectual ingenuity partially accounts for this persistent drive forward. But so too does the persistence of the objects of wonder. Wondrous Truths recovers the majesty of science, and provides a startling new look at the grand sweep of its biggest ideas. (shrink)

Scientific realism has been advanced as an interpretation of the natural sciences but never the behavioral sciences. This book introduces a novel version of scientific realism, Measured Realism, that characterizes the kind of theoretical progress in the social and psychological sciences that is uneven but indisputable. It proposes a theory of measurement, Population-Guided Estimation, that connects natural, psychological, and social scientific inquiry. Presenting quantitative methods in the behavioral sciences as at once successful and regulated by the world, the book will (...) engage philosophers of science, historians of science, sociologists of science, and scientists interested in the foundations of their own disciplines. Part I introduces measured realism beginning with a novel realist theory of measurement (Population-Guided Estimation, or PGE). It examines two other versions of scientific realism — minimal (Hacking) and robust (Boyd, Putnam, and Newton-Smith) — and advances measured realism as best supported by the evidence in the behavioral sciences. It also critically evaluates the anti-realist arguments of van Fraassen, Laudan, and Fine. Part II formulates and develops a version of epistemological naturalism most appropriate to measured realism. Drawing upon the realist theory of measurement developed earlier, it favorably appraises a variety of statistical methods in the behavioral sciences against selected criticisms. It concludes that traditional, narrative methods in the behavioral and social sciences are unreliable by the measures of epistemological naturalism. (shrink)

Este ensayo intenta abordar las complejas diferencias entre Martin Heidegger y Jacques Derrida. Se concentra en las suposiciones fundamentales involucradas en la lectura de Ser y Tiempo de Heidegger y la “célebre” reciente atención de Derrida a este texto. ¿Acaso el trabajo temprano de Heidegger está esencialmente manchado por la “metafísica de la presencia”, tal y como Derrida quiere sugerir? Después de trazar la interpretación de Derrida, el autor intenta mostrar cómo los lectores de Ser y Tiempo no necesitan sucumbir (...) ante las críticas de Derrida. (shrink)

Significance testing is the primary method for establishing causal relationships in psychology. Meehl [1978, 1990a, 1990b] and Faust [1984] argue that significance tests and their interpretation are subject to actuarial and psychological biases, making continued adherence to these practices irrational, and even partially responsible for the slow progress of the ‘soft’ areas of psychology. I contend that familiar standards of testing and literature review, along with recently developed meta-analytic techniques, are able to correct the proposed actuarial and psychological biases. In (...) particular, psychologists embrace a principle of robustness which states that real psychological effects are (1) reproducible by similar methods, (2) detectable by diverse means, and (3) able to survive theoretical integration. By contrast, spurious significant findings perish under the strain of persistent tests of their robustness. The resulting vindication of significance testing confers on the world a role in determining the rationality of a method, and also affords us an explanation for the fast progress of ‘hard’ areas of psychology. *I would like to thank Dick Boyd and Phil Gasper for helpful comments on the ideas presented here. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Recent work in moral theory includes an intriguing new argument that the vagueness of moral properties, together with two well-known and well-received metaethical principles, entails the incredible conclusion that it is impossible to be moral. I show that the argument equivocates between “it is true that A and B are morally indistinguishable” and “it is not false that A and B are morally indistinguishable.” As expected the argument is interesting but unsound. It is therefore not impossible to be moral.RÉSUMÉ: (...) Les travaux récents en théorie morale comprennent un nouvel argument intrigant voulant que le caractère vague des propriétés morales, joint à deux principes métaéthiques bien connus et généralement admis, entraîne une conclusion incroyable, soit qu’il est impossible d’être moral. Je montre que cet argument entretient l’équivoque entre «il est vrai que A et B sont moralement impossibles à distinguer» et «il n’est pas faux que A et B soient moralement impossibles à distinguer». Comme on s’y attendait, l’argument est intéressant mais mal fondé. Il n’est donc pas impossible d’être moral. (shrink)

Wondrous Truths answers two questions about the steep rise of theoretical discoveries around 1600: Why in the European West? And why so quickly? The history of science's awkward assortment of accident and luck, geography and personal idiosyncrasy, explains scientific progress alongside experimental method. J.D. Trout's blend of scientific realism and epistemic naturalism carries us through neuroscience, psychology, history, and policy, and explains how the corpuscular hunch of Boyle and Newton caught on.

Scientific realists contend that theory-conjunction presents a problem for empiricist conceptions of scientific knowledge and practice. Van Fraassen (1980) has offered a competing account of theory-conjunction which I argue fails to capture the mercenary character of epistemic dependence in science. Representative cases of theory-conjunction developed in the present paper show that mercenary reliance implies a "principle of epistemic symmetry" which only a realist can consistently accommodate. Finally, because the practice in question involves the conjunction of theories, a version of realism (...) more robust than the "entity realism" of Cartwright (1983, 1989) and Hacking (1983) is required to explain the success of theory-conjunction. (shrink)

Realizing the ideal of democracy requires political inclusion for citizens. A legitimate democracy must give citizens the opportunity to express their attitudes about the relative attractions of different policies, and access to political mechanisms through which they can be counted and heard. Actual governance often aims not at accurate belief, but at nonepistemic factors like achieving and maintaining institutional stability, creating the feeling of government legitimacy among citizens, or managing access to influence on policy decision-making. I examine the traditional relationship (...) between inclusiveness and accuracy, and illustrate this connection by discussing empirical work on how group decision-making can improve accuracy. I also advance a Generic Epistemic Principle that any evidence-based decision-making procedures must embrace. Focusing on policy-making, I then measure the distance between these standards and the ones actually implemented in U.S. political settings. Psychological research on individual and group decision-making is a source of normative assessment for existing policy judgment, but it neither rationalizes nor legitimates the actual and typical processes used in U.S. institutions of political decision making. To establish this point, I focus on one characteristic government institution—the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology—that displays deliberative processes at odds with the sciences they advocate, and with the Generic Epistemic Principle. I explain this discouraging condition in terms of several inveterate factors in U.S. politics: a limitlessly money-driven and endless campaigning process that effectively forces elected representatives to align themselves with money and vote strategically, the use of procedural arrangements known to make people feel politically included when they are not, and the unresponsiveness of a majoritarian (vs. consensus) democracy. (shrink)