SPP 1516:  New Frameworks of Rationality

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Chemistry ; Humanities ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Medicine
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 168613136

Rationality is a key concept in psychology and philosophy. A divide and conquer approach between psychology and philosophy, however, has prevented both disciplines from taking into account one another's progress. Philosophy's mission has been to characterise what it means to be rational, and to put forth general principles, theories and axioms defining rationality. In contrast, psychology's mission has been to empirically investigate to what extent people's cognition and behaviour conform to those norms of rationality, and if deviations occur, explain why they occur. The consequence of this division of labour was that psychologists focussed on the analysis of how and why people deviate from specific normative theories of rationality, but barred themselves from making genuine contributions to the understanding of the nature of human rationality.
A similar neglect of the other discipline has also dominated in philosophy. However, in the last decade, theoretical philosophy has experienced a renaissance of the 'cognitive turn', which provides a good basis for collaboration between psychology and philosophy. An important link between the two disciplines is that several research groups have started to question the opposition between the rational and the psychological. These researchers have shown that people are generally remarkably successful in achieving goals, given the cognitive and the external constraints imposed by the environment. When measured in terms of these achievements, people most of the time are indeed rational. According to this view, the divergence between normative theories of rationality and people's everyday cognition might be not a sign of human irrationality, but the consequence of using narrow normative theories of rationality.
The goal of the Priority Programme is to establish a new discourse between psychologists and philosophers on the nature of human rationality. The assumption is that the lack of interaction between descriptive and normative theories of rationality is anachronistic and new concepts of rationality would challenge the conjecture of human beings as intrinsically 'irrational' or 'illogical'. Thus, the key question is 'What is rational?' rather than 'Are we rational?'.
The Priority Programme will explore the value of recent normative theories of rationality for modelling human thinking and decision making. In parallel, it will explore, which empirical findings from psychology can contribute to the revision of old and the development of new normative theories of rationality. Such a discourse between psychology and philosophy, so we believe, will foster durable bridges between the two disciplines and promote a deeper understanding of the nature of human rationality.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Italy, Netherlands, USA

Projects

• Agents and causes: Reconciling competing theories of causal reasoning (Applicant Mayrhofer, Ralf )
• An INUS theory of causal conditional reasoning (Applicant Klauer, Karl Christoph )
• Bayes Logic and Bayes Nets - Causal vs. Non-causal Induction and Inference with Logical Patterns of Correlations (Applicant von Sydow, Ph.D., Momme )
• Bridging Causal and Explanatory Reasoning: Normative and Empirical Consideration (Applicant Colombo, Matteo )
• Coherence-based probability logic: Rationality under uncertainty (Applicant Pfeifer, Niki )
• Coherence-Based Reasoning and Rationality: A Neural Network Modelling Approach to Decision Making (Applicants Bröder, Arndt ;  Glöckner, Andreas )
• Coordination Project of the Priority Program "New Frameworks of Rationality" (Applicant Knauff, Markus )
• How efficient are choice heuristics under varying degrees of uncertainty? (Applicant Hertwig, Ralph )
• Models of information search: A theoretical and empirical synthesis (Applicants Crupi, Ph.D., Vincenzo ;  Martignon, Laura ;  Meder, Björn ;  Nelson, Ph.D., Jonathan )
• Non-monotonicity, consistency, and rationality in human reasoning (Applicants Knauff, Markus ;  Ragni, Marco )
• Overcoming Meta-Cognitive Myopia (Applicant Fiedler, Klaus )
• Probabilistic Models of Coherence and Positive Relevance II (Applicant Siebel, Mark )
• Rationality of Heuristics in a Changing Environment (Applicant Simsek, Ph.D., Özgür )
• Reason Relations, Argumentation, and Conditionals: Applying Ranking Theory to Psychology of Reasoning (Applicant Spohn, Wolfgang )
• Reflexive Rationality: A Theory of Dynamic Choice (Applicant Spohn, Wolfgang )
• Revising rational beliefs in legal reasoning: Defeasibility, Counterexamples, and probabilities (Applicants Bäcker, Carsten ;  Knauff, Markus )
• Shared Common Grounds of Qualitative and Quantitative Rational Reasoning (Applicants Kern-Isberner, Gabriele ;  Ragni, Marco )
• Testing and extending a dual-source model of everyday conditional reasoning (Applicant Klauer, Karl Christoph )
• The Evolution of Unpopular Norms and Bullying (Applicant Hartmann, Stephan )
• The Role of Meta-Induction in Human Reasoning (Applicant Schurz, Gerhard )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Markus Knauff