McCormick Philosophy - Inductive Logic II

Rationality, Phil 183

Section 1, Fall 2024

DH 208, MW 1:30-2:45

Catalog Description: Phil 183 Examines the nature of rationality, its value, structure, limits, purpose, origins, operations, and proper use. Topics include the nature of deductive rationality, inductive rationality, bounded rationality, irrationality, reasoning under ignorance and uncertainty, probabilistic decision-making, expected value theory, utility theory, and game theory.

Rationality, purportedly, is the cognitive faculty that, more than any other feature, sets humans off from other animals. What is it and how does it function? What is irrationality? What are our best theories about rationality? How do humans actually reason? How should they reason? We will consider descriptive and prescriptive accounts. We will also consider theories and models about the function of rationality in different domains such as deductive logic, inductive logic, expected value theory, Bayes' Theorem, decision theory, game theory, risk, biases, and heuristics.

This course will focus on a series of central questions:

What is the nature of human rationality?

What is reason for?

How does rationality function?

What are the limits of rationality?

Did we evolve to belief falsehoods or reason poorly?

How should we make decisions when we have little information about the outcomes?

How should we make probabilistic or inductive decisions?

How should we weigh decision options?

What are we trying to attain with our decisions?

How should we reason when dealing with other people?

Under what circumstances do we make the best, most rational decisions?

All of our decisions require employing logic, or rules of inference. Deductive logic focuses on validity, or those arguments that, if their premises were true, would guarantee the truth of their conclusion. Inductive logic focuses on forms of reasoning that involve risk, uncertainty, and that can, at best, make their conclusion likely to be true. Probability theory gives us a set of formal rules for modeling and quantifying decisions made by rational agents operating without certainty. The cannon of inductive logic underlies the procedures and methods of scientific reasoning.

Required Texts:

Pinker, Steven. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Distributed chapters from:

Peterson, Martin. An Introduction to Decision Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Spaniel, William. Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Sept. 2011.

Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook by [Spaniel, William]

Specific reading assignments are all listed on the course schedule below.

Learning Objectives: By the end of the course, students who pass the class will understand:

advanced undergraduate concepts, tools, and theories of rationality.
advanced undergraduate application of reasoning and decision making.
advanced undergraduate comprehension of accounts of the limits of human rationality.
philosophical concepts. arguments, theories, and disputes regarding theories of rationality, axioms of rationality theories, utility, and value.
the basic concepts, tools, and theory of decision theory including:
the maximin principle, lexi-min principle, minimax principle, decisions under risk and uncertainty, decision theoretic paradoxes, and so on
the basics concepts, tools, and theories of game theory, including:
strong and weak dominance, pure and mixed strategies, Nash equilibria, solution strategies for zero sum, non-zero sum, cooperative, coordinated, simultaneous, and iterated games, backward and forward induction, and other important concepts in the field.

Student Assessment:

Students' abilities to meet these outcome goals will be evaluated with assignments, quizzes, tests, midterm, and final exams. There will be no makeup work and no extra credit.

Rationality Seminar Grade Structure

Midterm 20%

Final 20%

In-class reading quizzes: 12 @ 3% = 36%

Rationality/Irrationality Case Studies (Google Doc): 8 @ 2% = 16%

Case Study In-class Presentation 2 @ 4% = 8%

Midterm and Final will cover the first half only and the second half only of the course, respectively. They will cover the full list of terms accumulated from our readings and lectures, and they will be drawn from a list of essay questions provided for review before the tests. They will be in-class, in-person, closed book, closed notes.

In-class reading quizzes will be on the assigned readings for that week, and they will occur most weeks. They will be designed to test reading comprehension, check for attendance, and to boost in class participation and discussion of the materials.

Rationality/Irrationality Case Studies: Students must create a Google Doc at the beginning of the course and share it with Prof. McCormick at mccormick@csus.edu with full Edit privileges. In general, in a case study, the student will take a concept from the course, a bias, a principle, a rationality issue and find and apply it to a real world case. They will write it up according to the instructions linked on the schedule in their Google Doc. The due dates and details for the case studies will be on the schedule and announced in class.

In-Class presentation: all students must formally present 2 of their case studies in class during the semester. The first one for everyone will be the X is Being Irrational case in the first two weeks. See class and the schedule for details. The in-class presentation grade will be separate from the case study Google Doc grade.

No smart phone use, unless explicitly instructed by the professor, will be allowed in class.

Students may use a laptop in class for notes, but to minimize distractions for the rest of the class, please only have course materials on your screen.

Course Schedule: Rationality Phil 183 Weekly Course Schedule

Course Policies: Office hours, attendance policies, being tardy, late and missed assignments, makeup policy, cheating, intellectual property rights, students with disabilities, laptop policy are all listed here. https://sites.google.com/site/mccormickphilosophy/

Academic Honesty:

The CSUS Academic Honesty Policy is here. No cheating and no violations of the Academic Honesty Policy of any sort will be tolerated in this course. All sources must be cited and given appropriate credit. The author of any information from the Internet or another student from class must be given credit; using such information without indicating the source is stealing someone else's hard work and it is immoral. Cutting and pasting someone else's work is not acceptable. It is also unacceptable to make minor revisions in language to disguise someone else's sentences/ideas. Submitting work from a cheating website or from other students is a violation of the policy.

It is unacceptable to do any coursework for anyone else, either in the course now, or in the future. If anyone approaches you to take a quiz, or do a course assignment for them, notify me immediately. Any students caught violating this or any of the other academic honesty policies will be failed from the course and reported to the administration for disciplinary action, within the bounds of the University Policy Manual.

Plagiarism: From the university policy manual: Plagiarism at Sacramento State includes but is not limited to:

"The act of incorporating into one’s own work the ideas, words, sentences, paragraphs, or parts thereof, or the specific substance of another’s work without giving appropriate credit thereby representing the product as entirely one's own. Examples include not only word-for-word copying, but also the "mosaic" (i.e., interspersing a few of one’s own words while, in essence, copying another’s work), the paraphrase (i.e., rewriting another’s work while still using the other’s fundamental idea or theory); fabrication (i.e., inventing or counterfeiting sources), ghost-writing (i.e., submitting another’s work as one’s own) and failure to include quotation marks on material that is otherwise acknowledged; and

Representing as one’s own another’s artistic or scholarly works such as musical compositions, computer programs, photographs, paintings, drawing, sculptures, or similar works."

Collaboration: Students are allowed, even encouraged, to discuss lectures, readings, and assignments with each other. But every students must do his or her own work. Be cautious of sharing your notes, ideas, work, assignments, or papers with other students. Once you have given them a copy of or access to your work, you cannot control what they might do with it. If two or more students' work are found to violate the policy, all of the students will receive the same punishment, even if one did the work and the other plagiarized. Also beware of relationships with other students in which you stand to lose more than you gain. A student who freeloads off of your hard work might elevates his or her grade (or he might bring yours down) without working, and you get no benefit. Furthermore, you put yourself at risk for severe penalties for cheating.

Here is part of the university policy on academic honesty:

The attempt by a student to cheat on an exam or other academic assignment or to engage in plagiarism is a violation of a fundamental principle of academic honesty and integrity and will not be tolerated in the University. Formal procedures exist for dealing with these cases and penalties will be imposed on students who are found guilty of academic dishonesty. In the event of expulsion, suspension or probation, a notation is made on the student’s transcript. Suspension and probation notations remain on the transcript for the life of the suspension/probation. For information, contact the office of the Vice President for Student Affairs.

Artificial Intelligence and Academic Misconduct:

Using an AI text generator for any class assignments, unless the instructor specifically instructs otherwise, is dishonest and will be considered a violation of the CSUS Academic Honesty policy.

Submitting any course assignments or prompts to an AI text generator and then submitting the results or any altered form of the results for credit for the assignment in class unless specifically instructed to do so by the instructor, and in a form specified by the instructor will be considered plagiarism, and it could be subject to the full range of sanctions outlined in the university policy. The relevant passages about plagiarism are quoted above.

Acceptable and Unacceptable Uses of AI Text Generators

Acceptable uses of GPT-3, chatbots, LLMs, or other AI text generators:

1) Don’t use an AI text generator at all.

2) Submitting your original text or answers to an AI text generator to catch spelling, grammar, and minor structure errors, and making minor revisions in response to the AI’s feedback.

3) Using an AI text generator or LLM in a manner explicitly instructed by the professor as described in an assignment.

Unacceptable uses of GPT-3, Chatbot, or other AI text generators:

1) Submitting any assignment question or prompt (or part of it, or something similar to it) to an AI text generator (unless you have been explicitly instructed to do so by the instructor) and then doing one or more of the following:

2) Reading the AI's response, and using the ideas in the response as inspiration for writing my own answer to the prompt using my own words, or by making changes in the AI’s wording.

3) Copying and pasting all or part of the AI response into the course submission.

4) Making making minor and/or major changes to the AI response, and submitting those results for the course assignment.

5) Using the the AI response to figure out the correct answers.

This course may use evolving technology to help detect when student writing has been assisted by AI technology (like Chat GPT). Improper use of AI technology can be grounds for a charge of plagiarism or other academic misconduct, leading to academic penalties (like failing a course) and administrative penalties (like expulsion from the university), regardless of when the academic misconduct is discovered. It is likely that, in the arms race that is digital technology, what seems like today’s detection-proof AI writing tool will be easy to detect by tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

All students will be responsible for reading and following the university honesty, plagiarism, and cheating policies. They are posted at:

Academic Honesty Policy

Students with Disabilities

If you have a disability and require accommodations, you need to provide disability documentation to SSWD, Lassen Hall 1008, 916-278-6955.

http://www.csus.edu/sswd/index.html

Please discussion your accommodation needs with me after class or during my office hours early in the semester. The instructor must receive formal accommodation notice as early as possible, preferably before the course begins. Accommodations will only be made available upon receipt, and after a reasonable amount of time for implementing them into the course schedule and structure. The later the accommodation notice is submitted, the later the accommodations will be available. The extent, nature, and limits of accommodations will only be those explicitly and formally specified in the official accommodation letter. Students will be fully responsible for all course syllabus and schedule requirements either as stated, or according to the accommodation agreement. Students must meet with the professor to clarify all details.