Spring 2021: Rationality

Syllabus​

Readings

Foundations
1/25: (Ir)rationality?:  (Handout.)

• Tversky and Kahneman 1974, "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases"
• Cohen 1981, "Can Human Irrationality be Experimentally Demonstrated?"
• Stich 1985, "Could Man be an Irrational Animal?"  (Focus on §5)

​2/1: Rational Analysis:  (Handout.)

• Anderson 1990, The Adaptive Character of Thought (Read Chapters 1 and 6)

​Tools
​2.8: Probability

• Titelbaum 2020, Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology (Read Chapters 2 and 3).  
• Optional: if you really want to learn this stuff, instead you can read Chapter 1 (and, ideally, 2) of Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis 2008, Introduction to Probability.  And try your hand at some of the problems (answer sheet here).

​​2/15: Decision Theory

• Thoma 2019, "Decision Theory"

​2/22: Models and Precision: 

• Easwaran 2020, An Opinionated Introduction to the Philosophical Foundations of Bayesian Epistemology (Chapter 4)
• Schoenfield 2012, "Chilling out on Epistemic Rationality"  (Handout)

Details
3/1: Hindsight Bias and Motivated Reasoning:

• Hedden 2019, "Hindsight Bias is Not a Bias"
• Bright and Kinney 2021, "Risk Aversion and Elite-Group Ignorance"  (Handout)

3/8: Motivated Reasoning: (Handout)

• Hahn and Harris 2014, "What Does it Mean to be Biased: Motivated Reasoning and Rationality"

3/15: Confirmation Bias I: (Handout)

• Whittlestone 2017 (Read Ch. 2).  [Optional, but suggested: read the Introduction too]
  • Optional: `Reflections on Confirmation Bias'
• O'Connor and Weatherall 2018, "Scientific Polarization"
  • Optional: Weisberg response blog posts, 'Mistrust and Polarization' and 'How Scientific is Scientific Polarization?'

3/22: Confirmation Bias II: (Handout)

• Kelly 2008, "Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization"
• McWilliams 2019, "Evidentialism and Belief Polarization"

3/29: Biased Assimilation and Self-Deception

• Mandelbaum 2018, "Troubles with Bayesianism"  (Handout)
• Gendler 2007, "Self-Deception as Pretense"

4/5: Sunk Costs and the Status Quo 

• ​Kelly 2004, "Sunk Costs, Rationality, and Acting for the Sake of the Past" (Handout)
• Nebel 2015, "Status Quo Bias, Rationality, and Conservatism about Value"

4/12: Scarcity and Grit

• Morton 2017, "Reasoning under Scarcity"
• Morton and Paul 2019, "Grit" 

4/19: Moral Judgment and Emotion

• Haidt 2001, "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail" (Handout)
• Railton 2014, "The Affective Dog and its Rational Tale: Intuition and Attunement"​