Human reasoning in hypothesis-testing tasks like Wason's (1966, 1968) selection task has been depicted as prone to systematic biases. However, performance on this task has been assessed against a now outmoded falsificationist philosophy of science. Therefore, the experimental data is reassessed in the light of a Bayesian model of optimal data selection in inductive hypothesis testing. The model provides a rational analysis (Anderson, 1990) of the selection task that fits well with people's performance on both abstract and thematic versions of the task. The model suggests that reasoning in these tasks may be rational rather than subject to systematic bias. Over the past 30 years, results in the psychology of reasoning have raised doubts about human rationality. The assumption of human rationality has a long history. Aristotle took the capacity for rational thought to be the defining characteristic of human beings, the capacity that separated us from the animals. Descartes regarded the ability to use language and to reason as the hallmarks of the mental that separated it from the merely physical. Many contemporary philosophers of mind also appeal to a basic principle of rationality in accounting for everyday, folk psychological explanation whereby we explain each other's behavior in terms of our beliefs and desires (Cherniak, 1986; Cohen, 1981; Davidson, 1984; Dennett, 1987; but see Stich, 1990). These philosophers, both ancient and modern, share a common view of rationality: To be rational is to reason according to rules (Brown, 1989). Logic and mathematics provide the normative rules that tell us how we should reason. Rationality therefore seems to demand that the human cognitive system embodies the rules of logic and mathematics. However, results in the psychology of reasoning appear to show that people do not reason according to these rules. In both deductive (Evans, 1982, 1989;

Given a knowledge base KB containing first-order and statistical facts, we consider a principled method, called the random-worlds method, for computing a degree of belief that some formula ' holds given KB . If we are reasoning about a world or system consisting of N individuals, then we can consider all possible worlds, or first-order models, with domain f1; : : : ; Ng that satisfy KB , and compute the fraction of them in which ' is true. We define the degree of belief to be the asymptotic value of this fraction as N grows large. We show that when the vocabulary underlying ' and KB uses constants and unary predicates only, we can naturally associate an entropy with each world. As N grows larger, there are many more worlds with higher entropy. Therefore, we can use a maximum-entropy computation to compute the degree of belief. This result is in a similar spirit to previous work in physics and artificial intelligence, but is far more general. Of equal interest to the result itself are...

An intelligent agent uses known facts, including statistical knowledge, to assign degrees of belief to assertions it is uncertain about. We investigate three principled techniques for doing this. All three are applications of the principle of indifference, because they assign equal degree of belief to all basic "situations " consistent with the knowledge base. They differ because there are competing intuitions about what the basic situations are. Various natural patterns of reasoning, such as the preference for the most specific statistical data available, turn out to follow from some or all of the techniques. This is an improvement over earlier theories, such as work on direct inference and reference classes, which arbitrarily postulate these patterns without offering any deeper explanations or guarantees of consistency. The three methods we investigate have surprising characterizations: there are connections to the principle of maximum entropy, a principle of maximal independence, an...

Rationality is a complex behavioral theory that can be parsed into statements about preferences, perceptions, and process. This paper looks at the evidence on rationality that is provided by behavioral experiments, and argues that most cognitive anomalies operate through errors in perception that arise from the way information is stored, retrieved, and processed, or through errors in process that lead to formulation of choice problems as cognitive tasks that are inconsistent at least with rationality narrowly defined. The paper discusses how these cognitive anomalies influence economic behavior and measurement, and their implications for economic analysis.

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Constructing an appropriate model is a crucial step in performing the reasoning required to successfully answer a query about the behavior of a physical situation. In the compositional modeling approach [7], a system is provided with a library of composable pieces of knowledge about the physical world called model fragments. The model construction problem involves selecting appropriate model fragments to describe the situation. Model construction can be considered either for static analysis of a single state or for simulation of dynamic behavior over a sequence of states. The latter is significantly more difficult than the former since one must select model fragments without knowing exactly what will happen in the future states. The model construction problem in general can advantageously be formulated as a problem of reasoning about relevance of knowledge that is available to the system using a general framework for reasoning about relevance described in [21, 16]. In this paper, we p...

0 =h 0 in the diagram. The sawtooth line reflects the fact that even when the principle of indifference can be applied, there may be arguments whose strength can be bounded no more precisely than by an adjacent pair of indifference arguments. Note that a=h in the diagram is bounded numerically only by 0.0 and the strength of a 00 =h 00 . Keynes' ideas were taken up by B. O. Koopman [14, 15, 16], who provided an axiomatization for Keynes' probability values. The axioms are qualitative, and reflect what Keynes said about probability judgment. (It should be remembered that for Keynes probability judgment was intended to be objective in the sense that logic is objective. Although different people may accept different premises, whether or not a conclusion follows logically from a given set of premises is objective. Though Ramsey [26] attacked this aspect of Keynes' theory, it can be argued

. Problems for strict and convex Bayesianism are discussed. A set-based Bayesianism generalizing convex Bayesianism and intervalism is proposed. This approach abandons not only the strict Bayesian requirement of a unique real-valued probability function in any decision-making context but also the requirement of convexity for a set-based representation of uncertainty. Levi's E-admissibility decision criterion is retained and is shown to be applicable in the non-convex case. Keywords: Uncertainty, decision-making, maximum entropy, Bayesian methods. 1. Introduction. The reigning philosophy of uncertainty representation is strict Bayesianism. One of its central principles is that an agent must adopt a single, real-valued probability function over the events recognized as relevant to a given problem. Prescriptions for defining such a function for a given agent in a given situation range from the extreme personalism of deFinetti (1964, 1974) and Savage (1972) to the objective Bayesianism of...

The Internet exhibits forms of interactions which are not captured by existing models in economics and artificial intelligence. New models are needed to deal with these interactions. In this paper we present a new model—distributed games. In such a model each player controls a number of agents which participate in asynchronous parallel multiagent interactions (games). The agents jointly and strategically (partially) control the level of information monitoring and the level of recall by broadcasting messages. As an application, we show that the cooperative outcome of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game can be obtained in equilibrium in such a setting. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73, D83. © 1999 Academic Press 1.

We present a formal framework for treating both incomplete information in the initial database and possible failures during an agent's execution of a course of actions.