This course presents a state-of-the-art discussion of research on
judgment and decision-making. Decisions large and small are part of
everyday life. What should I have for lunch? Should I go running? Should
I pursue a relationship with this person? Will this job make me happy?
Should I have this lump removed? Should I save more for a comfortable
retirement? Usually, we don't make the best decisions, even when we have
the best information. But the quality of our decision-strategies
depends upon factors in economics, philosophy, and psychology.
Philosophy contributes its canon of literature on inductive and
deductive reasoning, and its focus on prescriptive questions about the
purpose of good reasoning. Psychology offers experimental evidence of
human capability in the area of judgment, and delineates the processing
mechanisms that produce good decisions. As the science of policy,
Economics describes the structural conditions that promote good
decision-making, and tracks the utilities, costs and benefits (both to
individuals and societies) of those decisions.
The course examines the philosophical and psychological foundations
of decision-making. It considers philosophical issues relating to
inductive and deductive reasoning, issues such as rationality, truth,
and the improvement of reasoning. In addition, we will look at existing
psychological research on decision-making, and discuss the impact of
psychological biases on personal decisions and public policies. It will treat such issues as: psychological models of deliberate vs.
automatic processes, intergenerational aspects of decision-making, and
the scientific findings on happiness and well-being. All of these goals
contribute to the improvement of reasoning, and an understanding of the
sources of our errors. Accordingly, the course will examine the merits
of individual and social planning as a way of compensating for the
psychological biases that otherwise spontaneously control us.
We will use two texts for this course:
Gilovich, T. 1991. How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press.
Trout, J.D. 2010. Why Empathy Matters: The Science and Psychology of Better Judgment. New York: Penguin.
Interested students may want to look at the websites of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, two excellent organizations whose work is well-represented in this course.
There will also be about 20 articles of various lengths posted on Blackboard.
Philosophy of Mind
This course examines contemporary philosophical and psychological work on the nature of the mind. We will discuss work by philosophers on the topics of internalism and externalism, the nature of mental content, and of consciousness. We will also look at foundational work in psychology and linguistics, and ask what those disciplines, too, can reveal about the mind. We will explore arguments for externalism from the integration of cross-modal information, arguments for nativism from the poverty of the stimulus (and recent empirical work in language processing that addresses the limitations of the traditional argument), and pragmatic features of language designed to manipulate and illuminate. Readings will be from, among others, Chomsky, Fodor, Grice, Burge, Chalmers, and Devitt. Psychological readings will draw on research on spoken language processing, with plenty of in-class demonstrations of jarring psycholinguistic phenomena. This unique combination of readings aims to display the tight connection, and natural continuity, between philosophical treatments of issues of mind, and foundational arguments in psychology about the nature of mental processes.
I have taught this course at different levels. Undergraduates write 3 short papers, devise thought experiments and propose actual experiments designed to adjudicate theoretical disputes. Graduate students present material with feedback and write a term paper.
Philosophy of Science: Explanation and Wonder
This graduate course will explore the nature of explanation, and
will examine the role that the sense of understanding, and radical epistemic
contingency, play in the best explanation for theoretical progress in science.
We will discuss current work on explanation (by philosophers like Hempel, Strevens, and Woodward, and psychologists like Keil, Lombrozo, Skolnick-Weisberg, Rottman, and Shtulman) and on dominant systematic approaches in the philosophy of science
(realism, empiricism, social constructivism, etc.). Readings will include philosophically
influential issues in the psychology of explanation and the history of science.
There will be a final term paper in the course.
TOPICS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: Philosophical Foundations of Narrative and Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences
In light of the growing philosophical interest in social science
-- itself spawned by philosophical concerns regarding social theory and
critique -- it will be necessary for informed philosophers to understand
the methods of social research before subjecting the s of that
research to epistemic evaluation. In this course, we will provide the
philosophical tools for this analysis, and no technical background will
be presupposed.
We will apply Verstehen approaches as well as statistical techniques, in
the examination of such research fields as narrative history,
psychoanalysis, and the relation between race and electoral
participation in political science. Given the widespread success of, and
adherence to, these inductive methods, we will examine the resulting
influence on philosophical conceptions of rationality. Throughout, we
will assess themes of realist and antirealist accounts of contemporary
social and psychological science.