Research on probability judgment has traditionally emphasized that people are susceptible to biases because they rely on "variable substitution": the assessment of normative variables is replaced by assessment of heuristic, subjective variables. A recent proposal is that many of these biases may rather derive from constraints on cognitive…

We present a proposal--"The Sampling Hypothesis"--suggesting that the variability in young children's responses may be part of a rational strategy for inductive inference. In particular, we argue that young learners may be randomly sampling from the set of possible hypotheses that explain the observed data, producing different hypotheses with…

According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

Kahneman and Tversky's critique of Cohen's position on adults' probability reasoning is not valid. If they think Baconian logic is normatively unsound, the onus is on them to explain why. It is valid and useful because nature itself is full of causal processes. (Author/RD)

Discusses Kris N. Kirby's work on signal detection theory and its application to Watson's selection task. Identifies problems with the design and interpretation of Kirby's card-selection experiments. (DR)

Discusses Over and Evans' alternative interpretations to Kris N. Kirby's card-selection tasks and finds empirical difficulties. Cites the potentially important contribution of Over and Evans to understanding of the card-selection task by applying the notion of epistemic utility. (DR)

Cohen's (TM 504 890) formal rules of intuitive probability lack normative or descriptive appeal, and his interpretation of the author's findings is not compelling. (CP)

Until recently, norms of experimental reasoning have lacked systematic theoretical development. Thus, it has been easy for psychologists like Tversky and Kahneman to misclassify certain human reasoning processes as being Pascalian and invalid, rather than as being Baconian and valid. (CP)