PhD Project

On my doctoral project, I’m interested on simple forms of reasoning (like heuristics) and how these are to be understood if we want to explain what we believe and how (or even whether) we are rational. As it turns out, these questions have also been asked by people in other scholarly areas, so I want to see what they have to say and how they can help me to better ask my questions.

More specifically, I’m interested in the sense in which we are rational to simplify reasoning tasks in general, such as prediction tasks or calculation tasks. Psychologists have been studying these under the label of heuristics, and some consider them cases of irrationality. However, I think we need more nuanced views of what it means to have the capacity to be rational in order to fully explain simplified reasoning. I also think that if we can successfully show that some instances of heuristics can sometimes be rational, we can make progress in answering questions about the nature of belief and how it relates to degrees of belief (or ‘credences’).