jonah n. schupbach
research >> current | cv
teaching

below is a list of some of the research projects on which I am currently working:

1. "Is the Conjunction Fallacy tied to Probabilistic Confirmation?" (draft as of 11.17.2008) - Crupi et al. (2008) offer a confirmation-theoretic, Bayesian account of the conjunction fallacy – an error in reasoning that occurs when subjects judge that Pr(x&y|e)>Pr(x|e). They introduce three formal conditions that are satisfied by classical conjunction fallacy cases, and they show that these same conditions imply that x&y is confirmed by e to a greater extent than is x alone. Consequently, they suggest that people are tracking this confirmation relation when they commit conjunction fallacies. I offer three experiments testing the merits of Crupi et al.’s account specifically and confirmation-theoretic accounts of the conjunction fallacy more generally. The results of experiment 1 show that, although Crupi et al.’s conditions do seem to be causally linked to the conjunction fallacy, they are not necessary for it; there exist cases that do not meet their three conditions in which subjects still tend to commit the fallacy. The results of experiments 2 and 3 show that Crupi et al.’s conditions, and those offered by other confirmation-theoretic accounts of the fallacy, are not sufficient for the fallacy either; there exist cases that meet all three of CFT’s conditions in which subjects do not tend to commit the fallacy. Additionally, these latter experiments show that such confirmation-theoretic conditions are at best only weakly causally relevant to the presence of the conjunction fallacy. Given these findings, CFT’s account specifically, and any general confirmation-theoretic account more broadly, falls short of offering a satisfying explanation of the presence of the conjunction fallacy.

2. "How to Be (and How not to Be) a Bayesian Explanationist" - Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation both offer models of inductive inference. Prima facie, these two models appear to conflict; nonetheless, recently many philosophers have attempted to reconcile the two. Such Bayesian Explanationists either try to show that these models, while indeed distinct, do not conflict with one another, or they try to show that one of the models reduces logically to the other. In this paper, I survey and critique some of the most prominent strategies that philosophers have adopted to this conciliatory end. I then argue that one strategy is particularly well-suited to merging Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation: the "heuristic" strategy. The heuristic strategy is able to avoid the problems that beset other strategies while maintaining an important role for each model of inference.

3. "Explaining Inference to the Best Explanation: On the Epistemology and Psychology of Explanatory Reasoning" (Dissertation) - This project seeks to illuminate and defend the pervasive human practice of explanatory reasoning. Such reasoning favors hypotheses to the degree that they give one a "sense of understanding" pertaining to otherwise mysterious facts. Through empirical research, I aim to illuminate the psychology of explanatory reasoning by showing that the human sense of understanding is often triggered by the presence of certain "explanatory virtues." Subsequently, I aim to defend (and further clarify) explanatory reasoning through probabilistic analysis of some of these explanatory virtues. Through such analysis, I argue, some explanatory virtues can be shown to hold normative weight; i.e., one ought to prefer hypotheses that possess these virtues to those that do not, ceteris paribus. Ultimately then, the main thesis that I aim to defend in this project is that many of those features of hypotheses that we tend to follow when seeking to relieve ourselves of a lack of understanding coincide with theoretical virtues that we ought to follow when seeking a greater probability for our hypothesis. Put in other words, the sense of understanding is an epistemic virtue insofar as it is sparked by the presence of certain explanatory virtues, which themselves are tied necessarily to the probability of an hypothesis.