Principles of Cognitive System Presumed within the Psychology of Rational Thinking
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/irtp.v3i1.167372Keywords:
psychology of rational thinking, principles of cognitive systems, reasoning, dual processes, cognitive biasesAbstract
Numerous psychological models of the rationality of human thinking have been developed since the middle of the last century within the line of research known as the heuristics and biases approach, descriptive theory of rationality or decision-making, complex cognition, or the psychology of rational thinking. The focal processes or phenomena are reasoning, decision-making, judging, and inferencing. Families of models revolve around formal (cumulative) prospect theory, the cognitivist fuzzy trace theory, ecological rationality, and dual-process theories. Regarding complex cognitive processing, there is a limited set of principles that researchers in the psychology of rationality implicitly, and sometimes uncritically, attribute to the human cognitive system. These principles may be referred to as the “boundary conditions” of the validity of psychological rationality theories, meaning that all psychological models of rational thinking, including the currently dominant dual-process theories, belong to a set constrained by the postulated qualities of the cognitive system's architecture. The following principles, which have not yet been explicitly stated in the literature, are as follows: cognitive miserliness, cognitive processing dependence on the environment, knowledge structures, probabilism, and the challenge of individual differences. The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical value of making explicit the foundational principles of cognition that guide the psychology of rationality, thereby encouraging a critical re-examination of the field's core epistemological and ontological assumptions.
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