How Do We Believe?

Abstract

My first 30-odd years of research in cognitive science has been driven by an attempt to balance two facts about human thought that seem incompatible and two corresponding ways of understanding information processing. The facts are that, on one hand, human memories serve as sophisticated pattern recognition devices with great flexibility and an ability to generalize and predict as long as circumstances remain sufficiently familiar. On the other hand, we are capable of deploying an enormous variety of representational schemes that map closely onto articulable structure in the world and that support explanation even in unfamiliar circumstances. The contrasting ways of modeling such processes involve, first, more and more sophisticated associative models that capture progressively higher-order statistical structure and, second, more powerful representational languages for other sorts of structure, especially compositional and causal structure. My efforts to rectify these forces have taken me from the study of memory to induction and category knowledge to causal reasoning. In the process, I have consistently appealed to dual systems of thinking. I have come to realize that a key reason for our success as cognizers is that we rely on others for most of our information processing needs; we live in a community of knowledge. We make use of others both intuitively-by outsourcing much of our thinking without knowing we are doing it-and by deliberating with others.

Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks

“…In fact, popular dynamical simulations, such as lateral inhibition in a network and drift diffusion models, that have been successfully applied to simulating a wide variety of cognitive phenomena that happen inside a mind , are equally applicable to simulating cognitive phenomena that happen across a group of minds (Theiner, Allen, & Goldstone, 2010). Not only are actions coordinated among a group, as though it was functioning like one mind, but individuals tacitly outsource their knowledge base to their community to carry out their cognitive deliberations in concert with other people in their everyday lives and in business (Maglio & Spohrer, 2013; Sloman, 2022; Wegner, 1995). Some have even suggested that conscious experience itself emerges between an organism and its environment (O'Regan & Noë, 2001) and even between multiple organisms (Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019).…”

Toward Greater Integration: Fellows Perspectives on Cognitive Science

“…In his Fellows paper, “How Do We Believe?”, Sloman (2022) illustrates the central theme linking his wide range of research topics together, culminating in one of the grand questions in cognitive science: How do people think? His response to this question guides us through four decades of cognitive science in an attempt to integrate two complementary perspectives on human thinking.…”

Introduction to topiCS Volume 14, Issue 1

“…Intended as an on-going and open-ended forum for all Fellows, the topic is launched here with a small, but fine selection of papers. In the preface to the Fellows Topic (Bender, 2022), the editor depicts its multilayered agenda and introduces the two Fellows who inaugurate the topic: Cleotilde 'Coty' Gonzalez from Carnegie Mellon University and Steven Sloman from Brown University, renowned for their work on, respectively, how people make decisions (summarized here in Gonzalez, 2022) and how they think (Sloman, 2022). The two not only do a great job outlining the answers that their research provides to fundamental questions in cognitive science, but they also provide a bird's eye view that allows for reflection on the field more broadly.…”