Abstract

This dissertation is a study of how methodological issues in psychology can have significant implications for philosophical accounts of interpretation, justification, and psychological explanation. In the first chapter, I analyze traditional philosophical accounts of interpretation with an eye to identifying the ways in which philosophers have used rationality as a methodological tool. I argue that these forms of methodological rationalism do not successfully cope with the challenge from the heuristics and biases research program which generally argues that human judgment is irrational. In the second chapter, I trace cognitive psychology's disciplinary trend to study conditions that facilitate rational rather than irrational judgment. This trend suggests we should seek to make rational judgment an object of study rather than a default methodology for the process of studying psychological judgment. I argue that social and moral interests in promoting cognitive health motivate and justify the interest in discovering conditions that promote rational rather than irrational judgment. I call this normative account of applied cognitive psychology ecological rationalism. In the third chapter, I argue that psychology's disciplinary interest in creating valid questionnaires motivates discovering the conditions of successful communication. I discuss the methodological lessons that the Gricean turn in psychological research brings to questionnaire design: in particular, the Gricean turn imposes evidential requirements on psychological research about the conditions of successful versus unsuccessful communication for specific contexts and the conversational norms governing communication in experimental conditions. In the fourth chapter, I argue that some methodological critiques of the heuristics and biases research program have intimate connections to naturalized epistemology: in particular, the ways in which Gerd Gigerenzer thinks cognitive processes should be specified for the sake of explaining human judgment suggest that cognitive psychology and naturalized epistemology are disciplines with shared explanatory goals. I argue that both invoke cognitive processes to explain the psychological transformation of inputs to output-beliefs; and both seek to explain the epistemic status of output-beliefs by reference to the same cognitive process invoked to explain its production. To close, I make a few observations on how the shared explanatory goals between cognitive psychology and naturalized epistemology recasts traditional challenges facing reliabilism.