Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- April 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198524496
- eISBN:
- 9780191584923
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198524496.003.0006
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology
This chapter shows how the probabilistic treatment of the conditional, introduced in Chapter 5, can be used to explain people’s behaviour on the Wason selection task. This task, the most discussed ...
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This chapter shows how the probabilistic treatment of the conditional, introduced in Chapter 5, can be used to explain people’s behaviour on the Wason selection task. This task, the most discussed task in philosophical debates about rationality, is a laboratory version of the problem of choosing the best experiments to test scientific laws. Popper’s (1959) method of falsification suggested that, logically, experiments can only falsify general laws. Accordingly, the rational strategy is to seek counter-examples to our hypotheses. On finding such a counter-example, or falsifying instance, then we at least know that our putative rule is false.Less
This chapter shows how the probabilistic treatment of the conditional, introduced in Chapter 5, can be used to explain people’s behaviour on the Wason selection task. This task, the most discussed task in philosophical debates about rationality, is a laboratory version of the problem of choosing the best experiments to test scientific laws. Popper’s (1959) method of falsification suggested that, logically, experiments can only falsify general laws. Accordingly, the rational strategy is to seek counter-examples to our hypotheses. On finding such a counter-example, or falsifying instance, then we at least know that our putative rule is false.
