Judgment, Choices and Reasoning

Fallacies
• Judgment and the elements of Reasoning
– Analysis of reasoning
– Analysis of judgment
– Relation of concept and judgment
– Order of development of the cognitive
processes
– Judgment as primitive cognitive activity
 Analysis of reasoning
• reasoning is present from the beginning of conscious life
in the human being,
• involving perception and memory and imagination and
conception
• may define it broadly and provisionally as purposive
thinking, that is to say, thinking carried on in the interests
of some plan which we wish to execute, some problem
which we wish to solve, some difficulty which we wish to
surmount.
• to involve the selection of certain ideas out of all those
supplied us by the problem, the manipulation of these
ideas in accordance with previously acquired habits, and
the attainment of the solution by a proper combination of
these two processes.
 Analysis of judgment
• A judgment, when put into words, is what logicians call a
proposition, and what grammarians call a sentence.
• that a process of reasoning, such as that of our illustration, contains
concepts combined in the form of judgments.
• judgment is a new mental operation to which we must now devote
our attention.
• Judgment and verbal expression; if the judgment is in any measure
equivalent to a proposition or a sentence, we ought to gain
assistance, in the distinguishing of its principal forms, from the
classifications of the grammarians and logicians
• In the judgment, " the book is heavy," we have the concept heavy
united to the concept book
• verbal precipitates of judgment we seem then to have two or more
ideas mentally united in meanings which may imply either the
postulated union or severance of the objects to which they refer
 Relation of concept and judgment
• the origin of concepts spring out of the mind's effort to mark off, and
render distinct, the various meanings
• some specific instances of the attainment and development of a
concept, an instructive fact concerning the relation between
conception and judgment
• E.g the concept of bad, badness
• Such a mental act obviously has implicit in it the beginnings of
judgment, i. e., the assertion of a relation between two mental
elements. When, with increasing age, language finally comes to our
assistance, we are easily able to apprehend the usage of our elders,
and we straightway apply the term "bad" to all acts of a certain
character
• Judge according to large measure of confidence in its correctness
 Order of development of the
cognitive processes
• Judgment, conception, memory, imagination, perception
• are in one form or another present in consciousness from the very
first; and each process, which we have described and analysed
-under one or another of these names, really involves each of the
other processes. At certain moments consciousness presents itself
as dominantly engaged in the way we call perception, sometimes in
the way we call imagination. But each operation involves the other,
and it would hardly be possible to point to a stage in development
where one was obviously present and the other obviously and
altogether absent.
• situation as regards its primary or secondary nature, its early or late
appearance, in the history of the individual consciousness
• the mental operation of cognising the object is essentially equivalent
to the assertion, "this is a chair," or "this is a thing to sit (231) upon.
• Another sound may represent judgments in the form of a command,
such as " I-am-hot-and-I-wish-you-would-take-the-blanket-off."
 Judgment as primitive
cognitive activity
• original form all judgment is essentially a
reaction upon immediately present perceptual
experiences
• Undoubtedly, rude judgments in which memory
and imagination play leading roles may occur at
a very early period
• the highly developed ideational judgments, the
recognition, or assertion, of relations, it seems
impossible to deny that the simplest case of
perception, with its connection of a first sensory
stimulation with something already familiar, is
also implicitly, at least, of the same genus as the
judgment.
• judgment does really deal with the analysis of
ideational (or perceptual) experiences
• Judgment is, then, in its most explicit forms,
undoubtedly a process in which we synthesise
concepts in the course of noting and asserting
relations.
• the synthesis may bring out relations of which
previously we- were not clearly cognisant. From
this point of view judgment is not so much a
matter of creating wholly new mental material as
it is a matter of ordering our mental equipment in
the most efficient possible manner
 Distinguishing judgment from
decision making
• Hogarth (1997)
– Decision making influenced by economist and
statistician’s research on how decisions to be made.
– Focusing on how people decide on a course of action
– Judgment has been influenced by research on
perception
– Judgment are usually regarded as assessment,
estimates, that provide input to decision making
– Judgments vary in accuracy (meximising accuracy),
decisions vary in optimality ( maximising returns
• Judgment are assessed in terms of how
accurate they are, while decisions are
assessed in terms of their potential
consequences
Distinguishing problem solving from
judgment and decision making
• Problem solving task – solution- effective
• Optimal decisions are unlikely to have
same effectiveness each time that theyare
implemented.
• People make decisions in unpredictable
environments, but
• Solve problems in predictable ones
Different types of judgment task
• Studies indicated several types of judgment task
– Naturalistic decision making,
– Effect of stress on judgement
– E.g Funk (1995) defines different types of task in
terms of situation and system factors
• Hammond (1996, 20000 more subject-based approach:
different task are defined in terms of the type of cognitive
processing
• Theres also studies of multiple – cue probability learning,
suggest the number of cues and the intercorrelations
between them have different effect on judgements
 Cognitive process underlying
judgment and decision making
Choices and reasoning fallacies
 Research: Possibilities on putting the three
concepts together in research

• Identification of informal reasoning

fallacies as a function of epistemological
level, grade level and cognitive ability
• Weinstock, P, Neuman, Y and Glassner a
(2006) Journal of Educational Psychology;
Vol 89, No 2, 327 - 341