Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Enrico Petracca (University of Bologna), who recently published a paper entitled ‘A cognition paradigm clash: Simon, situated cognition and theinterpretation of bounded rationality’ in the Journal of Economic Methodology. Enrico is involved in a project called ‘ embodied rationality ’, and pursued with his colleague Antonio Mastrogiorgio (University of Chieti-Pescara). The project aims to integrate the notion of embodied cognition within the framework of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality has been a hard-to-digest notion in economics and the other social sciences since its introduction by Herbert A. Simon in the middle of the last century. How could ‘rationality’ be ‘bounded’? And – as a typically related concern – would this imply that social sciences should abandon any normative horizon, giving the way to an unappealable ‘irrationality’?

The following post is by Astrid Kause  (pictured above), who recently completed her PhD at the University of Konstanz, in South of Germany. She continues her research  at the University of Leeds (UK), investigating  how individuals grasp and behave in face of uncertain phenomena like climate change. In this post, she discusses from a psychological perspective why this uncertain and complex problem does not require a complex solution – but how simple prescriptive decision strategies might help us to behave better in face of climate change . Climate change is considered one of the most challenging problems humanity has to solve in the 21st century ( van der Linden, 2015 ). What makes it so particularly difficult to grasp climate change? After all, we experience changes in extreme weather like rainfall, learn about climate change consequences like rising sea levels, hear scientists and politicians call for action against climate change or rather sceptic voices downplayi...

My name is Andrea Polonioli and I am a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. My primary research interests concern the philosophy of biological and cognitive sciences. The unifying theme of my research is the investigation of rational behavior and cognition. Andrea Polonioli Scholars in the field of judgement and decision-making have described a variety of heuristics that reasoners seem to deploy. Yet little attention had been paid to individual differences in the use of these heuristics, until Stanovich and his co-workers conducted a stream of individual differences studies involving reasoning and decision-making (e.g. Stanovich and West  1998 ; Stanovich  1999 ; and Stanovich and West,  2011 ). They found a remarkable heterogeneity in the use of reasoning strategies and that a sizeable number of people do not deploy heuristics. But they also discovered important correlations between the use of heuristics and measures of cognitive ability....

This is the second in our series of posts on the papers published in a  special  issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Maarten Boudry summarises his paper (co-written with  Michael   Vlerick  and Ryan McKay ) ' Can Evolution get us off the Hook? Evaluating the Ecological Defence of Human Rationality '. In the opening lines of his essay ' An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish ', Bertrand Russell wrote that 'Man is a rational animal  –  so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it'. Russell’s cry of despair is echoed by many writers. There is a cottage industry of books purporting to show that man is anything but a rational animal. Human reason, or so we are told, is a paltry and botched device, riddled with bias and error. Humans are foolish, obstinate, supersti...

I am posting this on behalf of Andrea Polonioli, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Polonioli My PhD project analyzes some recent developments in the ‘rationality debate’, which originated as a reaction to the body of research that has followed Kahneman and Tversky’s work within the Heuristics-and-Biases project. Empirical evidence suggested that people are prone to widespread and systematic reasoning errors, and pessimistic views of human rationality have been quite popular in the psychological literature. However, this picture has also attracted fierce criticisms, and several researchers have recently questioned pessimistic assessments of human rationality by emphasizing the central importance of evolutionary considerations in our understanding of rationality.  In a paper I recently published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences I present some steps already taken in my project. In particular, I critically discuss some research that has come togeth...