Thinking about norms: Epistemic, rational, and moral norms in human thinking

Thinking about norms: Epistemic, rational, and moral norms in human thinking Joelle Proust (jproust@ehess.fr) Institut Jean-Nicod (EHESS-ENS), UMR CNRS 8129, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France Emmanuel M. Pothos 1 (e.m.pothos@gmail.com) and Jerome R. Busemeyer 2 (jbusemey@indiana.edu ) Department of Psychology, Swansea University, UK Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. Ryan Miller (ryan_m_miller@brown.edu) and Fiery Cushman (fiery_cushman@brown.edu) Dept. of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, USA Katinka J.P. Quintelier (katinka.quintelier@gmail.com) Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Shira Elqayam (selqayam@dmu.ac.uk) 1 , Valerie A. Thompson (vat128@campus.usask.ca) 2 , Jonathan St.B.T. Evans (jevans@plymouth.ac.uk) 3 , David E. Over (david.over@durham.ac.uk) 4 ; and Meredith R. Wilkinson (mwilkinson@dmu.ac.uk) 1 School of Applied Social Sciences, De Montfort University, UK; 2 Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Canada; 3 School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, UK; 4 Department of Psychology, Durham University, UK Discussant: Shulamith Kreitler (krit@netvision.net.il) School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Israel Organiser: Shira Elqayam Keywords: action; epistemic norms; is-ought problem; moral norms; normative inference; rational norms Thinking about norms Humans are uniquely good at inventing norms, thinking about norms, complying with norms and defeating norms. It is small wonder, then, that norms are a focus of much interest as well as debate across the cognitive sciences, encompassing such diverse issues as rationality, morality and action. The aim of the present symposium is to bring together a range of psychological and philosophical contributions to this pertinent debate. Contributors come from diverse backgrounds, including epistemology, meta- ethics, moral judgment, decision making, and reasoning. We will examine foundational issues in normative thinking, such as: What is the relation between norms and descriptions? What are the psychological mechanisms underlying normative thinking? How do epistemic and moral norms guide action? What, if any, are the appropriate norms for knowledge, rationality, and moral behaviour, and how can they be determined? Proust: The norms of acceptance An area in the theory of action that has received little attention is how mental agency and world-directed agency interact. The purpose of the present contribution is to clarify the rational conditions of such interaction, through an analysis of the central case of acceptance. There are several problems with the literature about acceptance. First, it remains unclear how a context of acceptance is to be construed. Second, the possibility of conjoining, in acceptance, an epistemic component, which is essentially mind-to-world, and a utility component, which requires a world-to-mind direction of fit, is merely posited rather than derived from the rational structure of acceptance. Finally, the norm of acceptances is generally seen as related to truth, which turns out to be inapplicable in a number of cases. We will argue, first, that the specific context-dependence of acceptances is derived from their being mental actions, each embedded in a complex hierarchy of acceptances composing, together, a planning sequence. Second, that acceptances come in several varieties, corresponding to the specific epistemic norm(s) that constitute them. The selection of a particular norm for accepting answers to considerations of utility – to the association of an epistemic goal with an encompassing world-directed action. Once a type of acceptance is selected, however, the epistemic norm constitutive for that acceptance strictly applies. Third, we argue that context-dependence superimposes a decision criterion on the output of the initial epistemic acceptance. Strategic acceptance is regulated by instrumental norms of expected utility, which may rationally lead an agent to screen off her initial epistemic acceptance. Pothos & Busemeyer: Implications for the rationality debate from the quantum cognition research programme Bayesian theory has enabled an influential perspective on human rationality, partly based on such arguments as long term convergence and the Dutch book theorem. Moreover, behavioral predictions in decision making from Bayesian theory are typically supported by strong intuition. Yet, this intuition often goes against empirical findings. For example, Kahneman, Shafir, Tversky and collaborators have provided many compelling demonstrations of violations of the law of total probability or the conjunction principle. Recently,

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