Normative vs. Descriptive Accounts in the Philosophy and Psychology of Reasoning and Argumenta-tion: Tension or Productive Interplay?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan Hartmann, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448424181

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

There was a time when there was a fairly clear distinction between the tasks of philosophers and psychologists, who were concerned with reasoning and argumentation. At that time, philosophers were responsible for establishing and defending the normative foundations, and psychologists checked whether real people (including scientists) adhered to these norms. However, further research showed that the proper relationship between the normative and the descriptive is not fully understood and that the two are intertwined in various complicated ways. This joint project by psychologists and philosophers examined this interweaving in detail. We developed one of the leading normative frameworks in rationality research (the Bayesian framework) in the light of empirical studies in various ways and also showed how new theoretical developments motivate further empirical studies. In doing so, we were particularly concerned with the development of a new theoretical framework for theory construction and the question of how this framework can be tested (if at all). Overall, our project shows that the distinction between the normative and the descriptive can play a productive role in rationality research and that interdisciplinary collaboration between teams like ours is needed to clarify it.

Publications

• Bayes Nets and Rationality. The Handbook of Rationality, 253-264. The MIT Press.
  Hartmann, Stephan
  
• How to Revise Beliefs from Conditionals: A New Proposal, in: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Vienna, 98–104.
  Hartmann, S. & Hahn, U.
  
• Measuring Coherence, at the workshop Scientific Models and Scientific Inference, Castelveccana, Italy (invited talk).
  Hartmann, S.
  
• The logic of partial supposition. Analysis, 81(2), 215-224.
  Eva, Benjamin & Hartmann, Stephan
  
• Bayesians Still Don’t Learn from Conditionals. Acta Analytica, 38(3), 439-451.
  Günther, Mario & Trpin, Borut
  
• Coherence Considerations in Science. Research Colloquium, RUB Bochum (talk).
  Trpin, B.
  
• Deliberation and confidence change. Synthese, 200(1).
  Heinzelmann, Nora & Hartmann, Stephan
  
• Explanatory Power of Conjunctive Explanations. Doctoral Seminar, University of Maribor (invited talk).
  Trpin, B.
  
• Howson on the Problem of Old Evidence, at the conference Probability and Reasoning: A Conference in Memory of Colin Howson, London School of Economics, London, UK (invited talk).
  Hartmann, S.
  
• Lakatos, Bayes and the Role of the History of Science, at the Imre Lakatos Centenary Conference, London School of Economics, London, UK (invited talk).
  Hartmann, S.
  
• Learning Causal Structure: A Bayesian Approach. 4th East European Network for Philosophy of Science Conference, Tartu, Estonia. (refereed talk)
  Trpin, B.
  
• Modelling Explanatory Power. Introduction to Scientific Research Seminar (for master students of cognitive science), University of Ljubljana (invited lecture).
  Trpin, B.
  
• The Myside Bias in Argument Evaluation: A Bayesian Model, in: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Toronto, 1512–1518.
  Baccini, E. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Bayesian Coherentism, The Working Group in History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics and Science, University of California at Berkeley, USA (invited talk).
  Hartmann, S.
  
• Coherence and the Strength of Arguments. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• Coherence of Information: What It Is and Why It Matters. CogSci23, Sydney, Australia (refereed virtual poster).
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Coherence of Information: What It Is and Why It Matters. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Sydney, pp. 3617– 3623.
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• Coherence, Explanation and Truth, at the SILFS Triennial Conference 2023: Logic, Philosophy of Science, and Global Challenges, Urbino, Italy (invited talk).
  Hartmann, S.
  
• Coherentism, Explanationism and Explanatory power, European Philosophy of Science Association conference in Belgrade, Serbia (refereed talk).
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Coherentism, Explanationism and Explanatory Power, Workshop: How Should We Reason? at the LMU Munich (talk).
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• Confirmation, Coherence, and the Strength of Arguments, CogSci23, Sydney, Australia (refereed virtual poster).
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Confirmation, Coherence, and the Strength of Arguments. Conference: Applied Epistemology: Virtue, Vice, and Bias. Bled, Slovenia (talk).
  Trpin, B.
  
• Conjunctive Explanations. Conjunctive Explanations, 111-142. Routledge.
  Hartmann, Stephan & Trpin, Borut
  
• Models of Explanatory Power: A Coherentist Appraisal. Workshop: Models of Reasoning and Normativity, RUB Bochum (talk).
  Trpin, B.
  
• On the Value of Coherent Information. Conference: Epistemic Justification: Formal Epistemology Meets Mainstream Epistemology. LMU Munich (talk).
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• Source Code and Additional Plots for the Paper: Hartmann S. & Trpin, B. (Forthcoming) Why Coherence Matters
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• The Role of Coherence in Science, Introduction to Scientific Research Seminar (for master students of cognitive science), University of Ljubljana (invited lecture).
  Trpin, B.
  
• The Wisdom of the Small Crowd: Myside Bias and Group Discussion. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 26(4).
  Baccini, Edoardo; Christoff, Zoé; Hartmann, Stephan & Verbrugge, Rineke
  
• A New Posterior Probability Based Measure of Coherence. CogSci24, Rotterdam, Netherlands (refereed talk).
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• A New Posterior Probability-Based Measure of Coherence, in: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam 2024, pp. 1494–1500.
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• A Posterior Probability Based Measure of Coherence, International Conference of Thinking 2024, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy (refereed talk).
  Hartmann, S. & Trpin, B.
  
• Affirming the explanandum. Analysis, 84(4), 788-796.
  Trpin, Borut
  
• Conjunction Fallacy as Abductive Reasoning, International Conference of Thinking 2024, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy (refereed talk).
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Explaining the Conjunction Fallacy, in: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, pp. 5220–5226.
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Explaining the Conjunction Fallacy. CogSci24, Rotterdam, Netherlands (refereed poster).
  Trpin, B. & Hartmann, S.
  
• From Networks to Narratives: Bayes Nets and the Problems of Argumentation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 237-252. Springer Nature Switzerland.
  Keshmirian, Anita; Fuchs, Rafael; Cao, Yuan; Hartmann, Stephan & Hahn, Ulrike
  
• Novel Predictions for Boundedly Rational Agents: A Bayesian Analysis, in: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, pp. 3844–3850.
  Fuchs, R. & Hartmann, S.
  
• Novel Predictions for Boundedly Rational Agents: A Bayesian Analysis. CogSci24, Rotterdam, Netherlands (refereed poster).
  Fuchs, R. & Hartmann, S.
  
• The Open Systems View. Philosophy of Physics, 2(1).
  Cuffaro, Michael E. & Hartmann, Stephan