Towards a descriptivist psychology of reasoning and decision making

Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought

Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism – deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative (‘deontic’) conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden) premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.

The intersection between Descriptivism and Meliorism in reasoning research: further proposals in support of 'soft normativism'

The rationality paradox centers on the observation that people are highly intelligent, yet show evidence of errors and biases in their thinking when measured against normative standards. Elqayam and Evans’ (2011) reject normative standards in the psychological study of thinking, reasoning and deciding in favor of a ‘value-free’ descriptive approach to studying high-level cognition. In reviewing Elqayam and Evans’ (2011) position, we defend an alternative to descriptivism in the form of ‘soft normativism,’ which allows for normative evaluations alongside the pursuit of descriptive research goals. We propose that normative theories have considerable value provided that researchers: (1) are alert to the philosophical quagmire of strong relativism; (2) are mindful of the biases that can arise from utilizing normative benchmarks; and (3) engage in a focused analysis of the processing approach adopted by individual reasoners. We address the controversial ‘is–ought’ inference in this context and appeal to a ‘bridging solution’ to this contested inference that is based on the concept of ‘informal reflective equilibrium.’ Furthermore, we draw on Elqayam and Evans’ (2011) recognition of a role for normative benchmarks in research programs that are devised to enhance reasoning performance and we argue that such Meliorist research programs have a valuable reciprocal relationship with descriptivist accounts of reasoning. In sum, we believe that descriptions of reasoning processes are fundamentally enriched by evaluations of reasoning quality, and argue that if such standards are discarded altogether then our explanations and descriptions of reasoning processes are severely undermined.

How (not) to draw philosophical implications from the cognitive nature of concepts: the case of intentionality

Philosophers have often appealed to intuitive judgments in various thought experiments to support or reject particular theses. Experimental philosophy is an emerging discipline that examines the cognitive nature of such intuitive judgments. In this paper, we assess the methodological and epistemological status of experimental philosophy. We focus on the Knobe effect, in which our intuitive judgment of the intentionality of an action seems to depend on the perceived moral status of that action. The debate on the philosophical implications of the Knobe effect has been framed in terms of the distinction between the competence and performance of the concept of intentionality. Some scholars seem to suggest that the Knobe effect reflects the competence (or otherwise, the performance error) of the concept of intentionality. However, we argue that these notions are purely functional and thus do not have philosophical implications, without assuming normativism, which we see as problematic in a psychological methodology. Finally, focusing on the gap between competence and rationality, we suggest future directions for experimental philosophy.