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religion and reason as natural phenomena
Browsing All Posts filed under »bounded reasoning«
Talk at the Polish Cognitivist Association Conference
I’ll be going to give a talk at the Polish Cognitivist Association Conference in Poznan on April 18-19. The talk is mainly on the relevance of studying superstition for understanding people’s bounded reasoning capabilities. The title, in English, is “Bounded reasoning, bias and superstitions”. Here is the abstract: Racjonalność ograniczona, błędy systematyczne i przesądy Przesądy […]
Herbert Simon and scientific methods
March 1, 2008
A few days ago Mark Rowlands posted something on the Secular Philosophy blog which I have been meaning to comment on. The two most relevant section were: While we’re on the subject of what I don’t like, I should add that I equally detest scientism. Scientism is the view that all the ultimate truths of […]
What is this thing called superstition? – the outline
September 28, 2007
Jahoda’s 1956 Psychology of Superstition remains an often referred to classic in the area. His ‘definition’ of superstition also remains relevant: “the kind of belief and action a reasonable man in present-day Western society would regard as being ‘superstitious’”. Of course, this is not so much definition as the honest avowal that we lack one […]
Heuristics in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
August 17, 2007
Werner Callebaut, the scientific manager at the KLI said something a couple of weeks ago whose wisdom I am finding out: If you are doing research in one of the sciences of cognition then the first step is to check if something on the topic has appeared recently in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. BBS has […]
Wimsatt Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings
August 10, 2007
As I have previously mentioned, I am currently reading Bill Wimsatt’s new book. It is proving a difficult read – I have only managed to get to about page 100 of what is a fairly thick book. Wimsatt’s book is focussed around the implication of Simon’s notion of bounded rationality for philosophy. Thus far, I […]
Jahoda Psychology of Superstition – A conditioned response
July 31, 2007
Please forgive the pun, but it seemed too good to miss it when discussing behaviourist approaches to superstition. I bet that behaviourists get that line all the time, though. I find it most interesting from a historical point of view how Jahoda begins his chapter on behaviourism: If one were to arrange psychological theories on […]
Article for the Skeptical Inquirer
June 25, 2007
I have managed to finish writing up the basic ideas contained in “In a mirror, darkly”, which I’d presented in several places recently. I am sending them off to the Skeptical Inquirer. Now, I am going to concentrate upon writing a more rigorous exposition of those ideas in which I will also make more use […]
Just Another Deisidaimon 
March 2, 2008
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