Julia Staffel

In order to get around in the world, people need to reason about it, and people get around better if they reason better. This project advances a new view of what reasoning is, and what makes reasoning better or worse. Integrating empirical research in cognitive science and theoretical research in epistemology, the proposed theory diverges from philosophical orthodoxy in several ways: it claims that not all reasoning is conscious; it shows that reasoning involves degrees of confidence; and it expands formal models of ideal rationality to make them suitable for evaluating non-ideal human thinking.