Uma explicação cognitiva do ‘segue-se’

O principal ponto de partida de qualquer lógica dedutiva é o fato de que alguns enunciados se seguem necessariamente de outros. A lógica fornece regras que nos permitem demonstrar essas conexões entre enunciados, mas ainda é possível indagar por que devemos aceitar essas regras. Há várias respostas possíveis. Neste artigo, farei uma rápida análise de algumas delas, mas me concentrarei em expor e analisar a resposta cognitiva, segundo a qual as regras da lógica devem ser aceitas porque temos certos mecanismos inatos de processamento dedutivo que nos capacitam a ver que as inferências lógicas elementares são válidas. Ao analisar essa explicação, tentarei mostrar também que ela parece nos remeter a uma tese metafísica mais forte, a saber, a tese de que o desenho de nosso módulo de processamento lógico nos diz algo sobre as propriedades lógicas do nosso mundo

Learning, Institutions, and Economic Performance

T he greatest challenge for the social sciences is to explain change-or more specifically, social, political, economic, and organizational change. 1 The starting point must be an account of human learning, which is the fundamental prerequisite for explaining such change. The ability to learn is the main reason for the observed plasticity of human behavior, and the interaction of learning individuals gives rise to change in society, polity, economy, and organizations. Because learning is the main object of inquiry in cognitive science, only a dogmatic attitude would prevent social scientists interested in phenomena related to change from paying appropriate attention to its findings. The revolution over the past decades in cognitive science has produced valuable insights regarding the processes of individual learning across different types of environments. This is the main reason why cognitive science is not merely of peripheral importance for social scientists, but should be the starting point for any serious discussion of societal change. In this article, we explore the nature of individual learning and then proceed with an examination of collective learning and with a discussion of the emergence of institutions. We then provide a link between learning and overall economic performance and, in the end, examine the issue of path dependence. Individual Learning Research in cognitive science during the past decades has deepened our knowledge of the relationships among brain, mind, and behavior. In particular, work in the approaches known as "cognitive neuroscience" has advanced our understanding of how brain structures are linked to mental phenomena and observable behavior. 2 The cognitive architecture of Homo sapiens being the product of a long evolutionary process, a major issue that confronts us is the interplay between the genetic structure that has evolved in response to the evolving human environment and the cultural conditions that are a consequence of the institutional framework deliberately created by humans to order their environment. Because cognitive science is a very young discipline, there are, not surprisingly, a number of competing explanations for perception, learning, memory, and attention; even more controversy surrounds overall explanations of the nature of the cognitive processes and the interplay between mind and brain. In order to usefully apply cognitive science to political science, economics, and other social sciences, it is important to remember the analytical focus of the explanatory enterprise. For our purpose-coming to grips with the issue of societal change-we want to use theory that is sufficiently analytic to provide the following: • an empirically testable account of individual learning. • a satisfactory account of choice processes. • a foundation for explaining the processes of social learning, since the ultimate phenomena of interest are political change and economic outcomes. In light of these criteria, we need not engage certain questions debated in cognitive science-for example, concept formation, which involves complicated interaction among genetics, neuroembryology, cellular mechanisms, maturation By C. Mantzavinos, Douglass C. North, and Syed Shariq In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. We explore the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose, individually and in collective settings. We then tie the processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as "cognitive institutionalism." Besides, we show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level. C

Aprendizaje, instituciones, y desempeño económico

En este artículo ofrecemos una visión amplia de la interacción entre cognición, sistemas de creencias e instituciones, y de la manera cómo estos afectan el desempeño económico. Argumentamos que una comprensión más profunda del surgimiento, las propiedades operativas y los efectos de las instituciones en los resultados económicos y políticos debería comenzar por el análisis de procesos cognitivos. Exploramos la naturaleza del aprendizaje individual y colectivo, haciendo énfasis en que el asunto no es si los agentes son perfecta o limitadamente racionales, sino cómo los seres humanos en realidad razonan y eligen de forma individual o colectiva. Luego atamos el proceso de aprendizaje con el análisis institucional, ofreciendo argumentos a favor de lo que se puede caracterizar como "institucionalismo cognitivo". Además, mostramos que un tratamiento completo del fenómeno de sendero-dependencia debe comenzar en el nivel cognitivo, pasar por el nivel institucional, y culminar en el nivel económico.Incluye referencias bibliográficas (páginas 31-34

Entwicklung und Erprobung eines Kurztests zum Konditionalen Schlussfolgern

Die Prozesse, die dem logischen Schlussfolgern bei Konditionalaussagen (Wenn-dann- Aussagen) zugrunde liegen, sind häufig Gegenstand allgemeinpsychologischer Untersuchungen. In der Differenziellen Psychologie wird die Fähigkeit, logisch korrekte Inferenzen bei Konditionalaussagen zu ziehen, hingegen kaum thematisiert. Folglich existieren auch keine psychodiagnostischen Testverfahren zur Messung eines solchen Konstruktes. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist daher die Entwicklung und Erprobung eines psychodiagnostischen Tests zum Konditionalen Schlussfolgern. Dazu wird ein auf kognitionspsychologischen Theorien aufbauendes Stufen-Modell vorgestellt, das differenzialpsychologische Aussagen zum Konditionalen Schlussfolgern erlaubt. Dieses Stufen-Modell wird auf Konditionalaussagen mit zusätzlichen Negationen erweitert und ist damit auf das sog. Negationsparadigma anwendbar. In dem resultierenden erweiterten Stufen-Modell werden vier Stufen der Sophistiziertheit Konditionalen Schlussfolgerns (SKS) postuliert. Abgeleitet aus den theoretischen Überlegungen und aufgrund pragmatischer Vorgaben wurden 16 Aufgaben zum Konditionalen Schlussfolgern konstruiert, die einer Stichprobe von 905 Personen vorgegeben wurden. Da für die vier Stufen spezifische Antwortmuster(-wahrscheinlichkeiten) postuliert werden, lässt sich das erweiterte Stufen-Modell als Latente-Klassen-Modell präzisieren. Folglich werden die Daten mittels Analyse latenter Klassen ausgewertet. Es resultieren vier hypothesenkonforme Klassen der latenten Variable SKS. Nach dem theoriegeleiteten Ordnen der Klassen zeigt sich ein erwartungsgemäß positiver Zusammenhang mit Reasoning. Aus diesen vielversprechenden Ergebnissen werden Implikationen für die weitere Erprobung dieser 16 Items und insbesondere für die Bestimmung von Testgütekriterien abgeleitet. Neben den klassischen Hauptgütekriterien Objektivität, Reliabilität und Validität werden zudem acht Nebengütekriterien (darunter Normierung, Nützlichkeit und Testökonomie) betrachtet und für die vorliegenden 16 Items überprüft. Dies erfolgt durch theoretische Herleitungen, die an entscheidenden Stellen in drei weiteren Studien empirisch überprüft werden. Die betrachteten Gütekriterien können (fast) ausnahmslos als erfüllt angesehen werden, sodass es gerechtfertigt scheint, die 16 Items als „Psychologischen Test“ zu bezeichnen. Insgesamt kann festgehalten werden, dass es möglich ist, auf Basis des erweiterten Stufen-Modells ein Konstrukt Sophistiziertheit Konditionalen Schlussfolgerns einzuführen, das mit dem entwickelten Kurztest zum Konditionalen Schlussfolgern (KKS) objektiv, reliabel, valide und äußerst ökonomisch erhoben werden kann

Pragmatics & rationality.

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker's intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our 'finitary predicament': we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers' intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as "reasoning Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is under stood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a 'hard way' and a 'quick way' of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory's view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the 'quick way' that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation

Natureza e Metafísica: Atas do IV Colóquio Internacional de Metafísica

Este livro corresponde às atas do IV Colóquio Internacional de Metafísica, realizado entre os dias 27 e 30 de agosto de 2012 no campus da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. O evento contou com a presença de um grande número de espectadores atentos e heterogêneos e a participação de 85 pesquisadores nacionais e internacionais apresentando trabalhos relacionados com a temática do evento