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Confirming the Disconfirmed and Conjunction Fallacies| old_uid | 10683 |
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| title | Confirming the Disconfirmed and Conjunction Fallacies |
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| start_date | 2012/01/16 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Atkinson et al. (2009) show that it is possible for a conjunction to be confirmed robustly by some evidence to a greater extent than either of its conjuncts individually. They posit that this formal result connects to a distinct, non-traditional class of conjunction fallacy cases. I argue against this claim in two ways. First, formally, I argue that any case meeting their formal requirements is crucially distinguishable from conjunction fallacy cases. Consequently, while it would be a fallacy for experimental participants to rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts in such cases, it would be of a different type than the conjunction fallacy. Second, experimentally, I argue that the setup that Atkinson et al. suggest would not test for the presence of a fallacy at all. I introduce a "corrected" version of their experimental setup that would constitute such a test. Then, I present some initial experimental data that shows that humans are impressively sharp and indeed far from committing a fallacy in such cases.
Atkinson, D., Peijnenburg, J., and Kuipers, T. (Forthcoming, 2009). How to Confirm the Disconfirmed: On Conjunction Fallacies and Robust Confirmation. Philosophy of Science |
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| responsibles | Drouet, Martin |
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