Almost ready to go to Rome for the 2014 conference of the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS). Two talks to give there: partial entailment on Thursday 19 June, rationality norms and reasoning on Friday 20. Here below my abstracts from the program.
Crupi V.
A probabilistic account of partial entailment and refutation
Abstract. I will present and motivate five conditions as plausible axioms for a probabilistic analysis of partial entailment / refutation. I will then discuss the plausibility of the axioms and the significance of my main result, an axiomatic characterization for a specific class of ordinally equivalent probabilistic models of partial entailment and refutation. Material for this discussion will be drawn from the work of classical and contemporary authors addressing inductive logic and Bayesian confirmation theory, including Keynes, Carnap, Kyburg, Salmon, Colin Howson, Branden Fitelson, Peter Milne, and James Hawthorne.
Crupi V. and Girotto V.
Models of rationality and the psychology of reasoning: From is to ought, and back
Abstract. Diagnoses of (ir)rationality often arise from the experimental investigation of human reasoning. We suggest that such diagnoses can be disputed on various grounds and provide a classification. We then argue that much fruitful research done with classical experimental paradigms was triggered by normative concerns and yet fostered insight in properly psychological terms. Our examples include the selection task, the conjunction fallacy, and so-called pseudodiagnosticity. We conclude that normative considerations retain a constructive role in the psychology of reasoning, contrary to recent complaints in the literature.