Good Guesses

Abstract

This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren't certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don't explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories of belief, assertion, and the conjunction fallacy—the psychological finding that people sometimes rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts. More generally, we suggest that guessing helps explain how boundedly rational agents like us navigate a complex, uncertain world.

The Conjunction Fallacy: Confirmation or Relevance?

“…Since informativity is plausibly related to conversational relevance, theories that appeal to informativity are the most likely to be able to predict and explain our results. While Tversky and Kahneman (1983) themselves quickly dismissed the informativity approach, it was raised again briefly in Levi 2004, and has recently been given extensive formal exposition and defense in two different ways by Dorst and Mandelkern (2021) and Sablé-Meyer and Mascarenhas (2021). We will take these views in turn, summarizing them and discussing their pros and cons with regard to the present dialectic.…”

“…', 'Linda is a feminist bankteller' is very informative, while 'Linda is a bankteller' is not-even though it is more probable. Although Tversky and Kahneman do not pursue this explanation, more recent work in Levi (2004); Dorst and Mandelkern (2021); Sablé-Meyer and Mascarenhas (2021) develop theories of the conjunction fallacy where relevance plays a central role, as we will discuss.…”

Strong Belief is Ordinary

“…On the other hand, if guessing seems like a reasonable thing to dosomething like choosing an outcome to bet on -I have trouble seeing why Arden is making a mistake betting on something other than the most likely outcome. 41 This conflicts with Dorst and Mandelkern's (2021) claims about "intuitively unacceptable" answers to a question about where Latif will go to law school: if the probabilities he will go to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and NYU are, respectively, 38%, 30%, 20%, and 12%, Dorst and Mandelkern claim it is intuitively unacceptable to guess that he will go to Harvard, or that he will go to Stanford, or that he will go to NYU. (Dorst and Mandelkern elaborate: "To be clear, we are not claiming that people never have guesses like [Arden's].…”

“…But I have worries I think are worth raising about the arguments for HRS's positive view, both in their 2016 paper and in Dorst (2019), Dorst andMandelkern (2021), andHolguín (2022). I take it the most compelling arguments for the view of believing as thinking likely (HRS, Dorst) or guessing (Dorst, Holguín, Mandelkern) come from considering cases such as the following, which HRS attribute to Jeremy Goodman (Hawthorne et al 2016(Hawthorne et al : 1400:…”

Affectivism about intuitions

“…(1) One (as I have argued uninformative) way of conceiving of “graded beliefs” is just to point towards the already mentioned inclinations to believe or judge. (2) Another way is to conceive of them as (educated) guesses (Cohen, 1974 ; Dorst & Mandelkern, 2021 ), (3) in-between beliefs (Schwitzgebel, 2001 ), (4) credences (Jackson, 2020 ), or (5) in yet other ways (e.g. the ones reviewed by Bayne & Hattiangadi, 2013 ).…”