Naslov
The psychology of reasoning and knowledge attributions

Autori
Čuljak, Zvonimir

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
6th European Cogress of Analytic Philosophy. Volume of Abstracts / Kukushkina, Volha & Kijania-Placek, Katarzyna - Krakov : Jagiellonian University, 2008, 201-201

Skup
6th European Cogress of Analytic Philosophy

Mjesto i datum
Kraków, Poljska, 21.08.2008. - 26.08.2008

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
knowledge attributions; reasoning; cognitive psychology; epistemology; contextualism; invariantism

Sažetak
Atributor-contextualists (AC) (K. DeRose, D. Lewis, and others) maintain that the truth-values of knowledge claims vary contextually and, therefore, that the epistemic status of a belief as well as the epistemic position of a subject is a function of the contextually shifting standards for knowledge attributions. Consequently, according to AC, knowledge claims are not sensitive to the facts about the epistemic subject, but only to the context of the knowledge attributor. The advocates of AC find the supportive empirical evidence in the linguistic data provided by the contextual semantics of the verb “ know” . In this paper AC is, as usual, confronted with some invariantist objections, which are, however, supported by the empirical evidence from a different field: the evidence derives from the well-known empirical findings in cognitive psychology, e.g. in the works by P. Wason (1966), D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, A. Tversky and P. Slovic (1982), J. Holland, K. Holyoak, R. Nisbett and P. Thagard (1993). Those findings demonstrated that in various contexts people mostly do not reason according to logical or probabilistic rules, but according to heuristic principles, the reliance on which leads to systematic logical or probabilistic errors. Making inferential and probabilistic mistakes, the reasoning subjects therefore fail to acquire the inferential knowledge of the conclusions in question. Since the competence for the reasoning according to the logical or probabilistic rules is widely recognized as an invariant standard for the attribution of logical or probabilistic knowledge and also of the pertinent inferential knowledge, the presence or lack of knowledge in any of those different situations should be explained by the intrinsic facts about peoples’ psychology, their cognitive histories or their natural and cultural environments, and not by the shifting standards of knowledge attributions. The standards for the inferential knowledge attributions remain the same across the contexts even when practices in different contexts can follow some other reasoning rules (e.g. domain specific rules or pragmatic reasoning schemas). So the varying knowledge attributions in such cases depend only on the variations in the subject’ s context.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filozofija

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