This book began in our classrooms. At some point, we discovered that we both teach critical thinking courses that are idiosyncratic in the same ways—in short, as though they are courses in the psychology of judgment. For example, we both had our students read Robyn Dawes’s House of Cards (1994) and Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So (1991). We independently arrived at the idea that there were epistemological lessons to be drawn not just from the heuristics and biases tradition (which has received attention from philosophers) but also from the fascinating research on linear predictive modeling. But we also recognized that psychologists for too long had been wrestling with normative, epistemic issues with much too little useful input from philosophers. In their classic book Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (1980), Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross call for greater participation from philosophers in tackling the normative issues that arise in psychology. [W]e have become increasingly aware of the difficulty of defining what is ‘‘normative’’ when one moves beyond the relatively simple question of how to solve correctly some particular problem. ‘‘Normatively appropriate’’ strategies for the solution of some problems are extremely time consuming and expensive. It may be clear what must be done if one wishes a correct answer to such problems, but sometimes it may be even clearer that the correct solution is not worth the effort. This gives rise to more important questions of normativeness which are not fundamentally empirical in nature: How much effort, for what kinds of problems, should be expended to obtain a correct solution? We have become excited by such normative questions and are pleased that our book highlights them. We have not been able to make much progress toward their solution, however. . . . It is our hope that others, particularly philosophers who are more comfortable with such questions, will be motivated to pursue them. (Nisbett and Ross 1980, 13 –14) It is rare for scientists to call on philosophers to contribute in substantive ways to their scientific projects. Rarer still for scientists who are at the top of their field. Armed with the suspicion that there was something useful for philosophers to do in this area, we organized a symposium at the 2000 Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Vancouver. The purpose of the symposium was to explore the connections between research on predictive modelling and philosophy (see Dawes 2002, Faust and Meehl 2002, Bishop and Trout 2002). We have also presented these ideas to a number of audiences at Bryn Mawr College, California State University at Long Beach, Howard University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, University of Innsbruck, University of Utah, and Washington University in St. Louis. In almost every venue, there were philosophers whose reaction to these issues was similar to our own: the normative issues raised by the psychological literature are interesting and important, but analytic epistemology does not have the resources to adequately address them. So we sat down to write this book. Our goal in this book is to bring whatever philosophical expertise we can to bear on the sorts of normative issues that bedevil psychologists (like Nisbett and Ross). With a few notable exceptions, the normative concerns of epistemologists and psychologists have inhabited different intellectual worlds. When philosophers do discuss psychological findings, it is usually to dismiss them as irrelevant to epistemology. This book will have achieved its goals if it leads at least some philosophers and psychologists to admit (even if ever so grudgingly) that their field of study would benefit from closer cooperation with their sister discipline. This book is the product of somewhat unusual philosophical training. But then again, our philosophy teachers were an unusual collection of curiosity, talent, and trust. We are grateful to Richard Boyd, Philip Kitcher, Robert Stalnaker, and Stephen Stich, each of whom taught us in his own way the value of pursuing interesting but risky projects. They also encouraged us to explore issues that lie outside the disciplinary confines of philosophy. In so doing, we were lucky to learn psychology, in graduate school and after, from Frank Keil, Richard Nisbett, David Pisoni, viii Preface V. S. Ramachandran, Robert Remez, Roger Shepard, and Gary Wells. These psychologists instilled in us an appreciation for a science of the mind and (probably nwittingly) a recognition of its relevance to philosophical questions. Given our general outlook, we doubt that we can very reliably identify the most important intellectual influences on our epistemological views. But we are confident that they include Richard Boyd’s ‘‘Scientific Realism and Naturalistic Epistemology’’ (1980), Alvin Goldman’s ‘‘Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition’’ (1978) as well as Epistemology and Cognition (1986), Philip Kitcher’s ‘‘The Naturalist’s Return’’ (1992) as well as chapter 8 of The Advancement of Science (1993), Hilary Kornblith’s Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground (1993), and Stephen Stich’s The Fragmentation of Reason (1990). For useful conversations about the material in this book, we would like to thank our colleagues and friends: Paul Abela, Robert Baum, Travis Butler, Douglas Epperson, Joe Kupfer, Dominic Murphy, Gary Pavela, Bill Robinson, Abe Schwab, Peter Vranas, Daniel Weiskopf, and Gary Wells. We would like especially to thank Joe Mendola, Michael Strevens, and Mark Wunderlich, who gave us detailed comments on earlier drafts of this book, and James Twine, who supplied excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to the National Science Foundation for grants SES#0354536 (to MB) and SES#0327104 (to JDT) in support of the research culminating in this book. The findings in Arkes (2003) should keep us modest. 205 Pages Of valuable information just for YOU. Get It NOW!

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