January, 2002
CG152: Thinking Syllabus
Instructor: Steven Sloman
TEXT: Reasoning and Thinking by Ken Manktelow (R&T).
* Articles with * are available online through Brown.
Week 1 (1/24) Introduction to thinking
R&T 1
Week 2.1 (1/29) Cognition: rules or associations?
* Sloman, S. A. & Rips, L. J. (1998). Similarity as an explanatory construct. Cognition, 65, 87101.
Week 2.2, 3, 4 (1/31-2/14) Categorization
Lakoff, G. (1987). Chapters 1 and 2. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories
reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Strevens, M. (2001). The essentialist aspect of naive theories. Cognition, 74, 149-175.
* Ahn, W-k., Kalish, C., Gelman, S. A., Medin, D. L., Luhmann, C., Atran, S., Coley, J. D. &
Shafto, P. (2001). Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts, Cognition, 82,
59-69.
* Strevens, M. (2001). Only causation matters: reply to Ahn et al. Cognition, 82, 71-76.
Week 5 (2/21) Similarity
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327-352.
Week 6 (2/26-2/28) Probability judgment
R&T 8
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. In D.
Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.) Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Lagnado, D. A. & Shanks, D. R. (2002). Probability judgment in hierarchical learning: a
conflict between predictiveness and coherence. Cognition, 83, 81-112.
Week 7 (3/5-3/7) Group Presentations (papers due following week)
Week 8.1 (3/12) Categorical induction
R&T 7
Shafir, E., Smith, E. E. & Osherson, D. (1990). Typicality and reasoning fallacies. Memory &
Cognition, 18, 229-239.
Week 8.2 (3/14) Mid-term
Week 9 (3/19-3/21) Reasoning
R&T 3-5
Sloman, S. A. (in press). Two systems of reasoning. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D.
Kahneman. Heuristics of Judgment: Extensions and Applications.
Weeks 10, 11 (4/2-4/11) Decision making
R&T 9, 10
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A.(1984). Choices, values, and frames. American Psychologist, 39,
341-350.
* Fetherstonhaugh, D., Slovic, P., Johnson, S., & Friedrich, J. (1997). Insensitivity to the value
of human life: a study of psychophysical numbing. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14,
283-300.
Weeks 12, 13.1 (4/16-4/23) Causal and counterfactual reasoning
* Ahn, W., Kalish, C. W., Medin, D.L., & Gelman, S.A. (1995). The role of covariation versus
mechanism information in causal attribution. Cognition, 54, 299-352.
Glymour, C. (2001). Another way for nerds to make babies: The frame problem and causal
inference in developmental psychology. Chapter 3 of The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and
Graphical Causal Models in Psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
* Kahneman, D. & Varey, C. A. (1990). Propensities and counterfactuals: The loser that almost
won. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1101-1110.
Week 13.2, 14, 15 (4/25-5/7) Presentations (papers due following week)