3 Extracting Epistemic Lessons from Ameliorative Psychology

Ameliorative Psychology offers a number of useful normative recommendations

about how people (or at least some people) ought to

reason. One of our main goals in this book is to articulate the epistemological

framework that guides these recommendations. Perhaps the

most obvious feature of this normative framework is that it is not primarily

a theory of epistemic justification, as understood by contemporary

epistemologists. Justification is a property of belief tokens. Ameliorative

Psychology does not dwell on individual belief tokens. It is in the business

of telling us what are the best ways to go about (say) making tentative diagnoses

of psychiatric patients (Goldberg Rule) or making judgments

about a person’s ability to repay a loan (credit-scoring models). Ameliorative

Psychology assesses reasoning strategies. At the center of the epistemological

framework guiding the prescriptions of Ameliorative Psychology

is the notion of epistemic excellence as applied to reasoning strategies.

What features of a reasoning strategy contribute to its epistemic excellence?

As far as we know, Ameliorative Psychologists have not explicitly

tried to extract and carefully articulate their normative assumptions. (It

is not uncommon for scientists to usefully employ a theoretical notion

without having fully articulated it.) By looking at some of the successes

and failures of Ameliorative Psychology, we can identify three factors that

tend to contribute to the quality of a reasoning strategy. The epistemic

quality of a reasoning strategy is a function of its reliability on a wide

range of problems; the strategy’s tractability (that is, how difficult it is to

employ); and the significance of the problems it is meant to tackle. Let’s

briefly examine how these three basic notions manifest themselves in the

Ameliorative Psychology literature.

Ameliorative Psychology offers a number of useful normative recommendations

about how people (or at least some people) ought to

reason. One of our main goals in this book is to articulate the epistemological

framework that guides these recommendations. Perhaps the

most obvious feature of this normative framework is that it is not primarily

a theory of epistemic justification, as understood by contemporary

epistemologists. Justification is a property of belief tokens. Ameliorative

Psychology does not dwell on individual belief tokens. It is in the business

of telling us what are the best ways to go about (say) making tentative diagnoses

of psychiatric patients (Goldberg Rule) or making judgments

about a person’s ability to repay a loan (credit-scoring models). Ameliorative

Psychology assesses reasoning strategies. At the center of the epistemological

framework guiding the prescriptions of Ameliorative Psychology

is the notion of epistemic excellence as applied to reasoning strategies.

What features of a reasoning strategy contribute to its epistemic excellence?

As far as we know, Ameliorative Psychologists have not explicitly

tried to extract and carefully articulate their normative assumptions. (It

is not uncommon for scientists to usefully employ a theoretical notion

without having fully articulated it.) By looking at some of the successes

and failures of Ameliorative Psychology, we can identify three factors that

tend to contribute to the quality of a reasoning strategy. The epistemic

quality of a reasoning strategy is a function of its reliability on a wide

range of problems; the strategy’s tractability (that is, how difficult it is to

employ); and the significance of the problems it is meant to tackle. Let’s

briefly examine how these three basic notions manifest themselves in the

Ameliorative Psychology literature.