Thought and Language - Lecture Four Flashcards
Representation and Reasoning
Representation
Knowledge of the world which forms the content of our thoughts
Analogous representations
Mental images
Symbolic representations
Prepositional thoughts - internal statements
Mental imagery
Representation of a stimulus that originates inside your brain, rather than from external sensory input
What do symbols represent?
Any kind of content, but don’t resemble what it is they stand for
Prepositional thought
Statements that express ideas
Why is categorisation useful?
It allows us to know what to expect each time we encounter a member of a category
Reasoning
Intelligent thought
Making decisions, problem solving
Drawing implications from our beliefs
Deductive reasoning
Begin with a belief, what are the implications of those beliefs? Move from the general principles or rules to specific instances.
Syllogism
Two or more prepositions that are assumed to be true
Inductive reasoning
Start with specifics and then conclude general principles
What influences our ability to reason deductively?
Belief bias, confirmation bias and the content of what we are reasoning about matters
Tets hypotheses
From data to theories
What influences our ability to reason?
Belief bias, people are often incorrect and confirmation bias
Belief bias
Rather than applying a logical rule or following through - people might decide it’s not valid due to its plausibility.
People are often incorrect
Reason on the basis of plausibility rather than logical rules
The confirmation bias
The beliefs we hold influence how we process information
Making judgments
Drawing conclusions from experience
Heuristics
Shortcuts that are correct most of the time
Availability heuristics
Mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific decision
Why use heuristics? Are they good for us?
They save time, often work and are usually efficient
