Oaksford & Chater/Bayesian Rationality: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW -- CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Oaksford-03… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than April 11, 2008 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ** Multiple Book Review Information ** ================================================================== Below is a link to the forthcoming précis of a book accepted for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS). Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed. BOOK: Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, 2007 AUTHORS: Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater ABSTRACT: According to Aristotle humans are the rational animal. The borderline between rationality and irrationality is fundamental to many aspects of human life including the law, mental health, and language interpretation. But what is it to be rational? One answer, deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition since ancient Greece, is that rationality concerns reasoning according to the rules of logic—the formal theory that specifies the inferential connections that hold with certainty between propositions. Piaget viewed logical reasoning as defining the end-point of cognitive development; and contemporary psychology of reasoning has focussed on comparing human reasoning against logical standards. Bayesian Rationality argues that rationality is defined instead by the ability to reason about uncertainty. While people are typically poor at numerical reasoning about probability, human thought is sensitive to subtle patterns of qualitative Bayesian, probabilistic reasoning. In Chapter 1—4 of Bayesian Rationality, the case is made that cognition in general, and human everyday reasoning in particular, is best viewed as solving probabilistic, rather than logical, inference problems. In chapters 5—7 the psychology of “deductive” reasoning is tackled head-on: it is argued that purportedly “logical” reasoning problems, revealing apparently irrational behaviour, are better understood from a probabilistic point of view. Data from conditional reasoning, Wason’s selection task, and syllogistic inference are captured by recasting these problems probabilistically. The probabilistic approach makes a variety of novel predictions which have been experimentally confirmed. The book considers the implications of this work, and the wider “probabilistic turn” in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, for understanding human rationality. Keywords: Reasoning, rationality, logic, probability, Bayes theorem, rational analysis, selection task, syllogisms, conditional inference, non-monotonic reasoning PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Oaksford-03132008/Referees/ ================================================================== BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW -- CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Oaksford-03… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than April 11, 2008 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------