Collaborative Proposal: Model Knowledge and Scientific Judgment

科学研究中的一个中心问题是证据和假设之间的关系。但科学研究并不是唯一研究这种关系的学科。科学研究长期以来忽视了半个世纪以来引人入胜和重要的经验主义文献的价值，我们称之为改进心理学。改进心理学的一个核心发现是，当涉及到对实际重要事件的预测时，统计预测规则(或SPR)通常比人类专家更可靠(通常也更可靠)(Meehl 1954，Sawyer 1966，Dawes 1994)。这篇文献提供了经过反复和成功的经验测试的有效推理策略。这项建议是为了发展和阐明一种人类知识和推理的观点，认真地将改进心理学作为推理卓越的例证。它打算从文献中提取科学在良好推理方面所学到的东西，然后将这些经验应用于个人推理者和社会机构，包括科学机构。新的立场被定义为战略可靠性：优秀推理涉及到认知资源的有效分配，以稳健可靠的推理策略。战略可靠性是一种明确以成本收益为基础的认识论，适用于真实的、有限的知情者。认识论是哲学的一个分支，与知识和良好的推理有关。这一提议将把认识论从分析哲学的学术争论中解放出来，并将其视为科学哲学的一个分支：规范认识论将被正确地理解和研究，作为认知科学的一个基本特征，尽管往往是隐含的。通过挖掘和澄清某一特定科学分支(在这种情况下，是心理学)的哲学前提(在这种情况下，是认识论的)，个人投资将把科学哲学家的技能和兴趣带到认识论中。一种关于如何最好地对经验问题进行推理的新理论，特别是一个拥有半个世纪经验支持的理论，肯定会产生广泛而重大的影响。这里有四个这样的影响：(1)我们从改进心理学中提取的推理卓越的观点自然提出了一些具体的有用的经验教训，关于人们如何改进他们关于因果关系、诊断和成本效益分析的推理(以及其他问题)。该提案的目的是开始利用科学未被充分利用的力量来改善人们对重要问题的推理。(2)SPR目前正被机构用来做出一些非常重要的决策，这些决策深刻地影响着人们的生活(从医疗诊断到信贷决策)。社会机构使用SPR是科学影响社会的一种重要方式(在很大程度上被忽视)。该项目将清楚地阐明改善心理学的基本原则和假设。(3)从改进心理学中提炼出的推理优秀观可以为社会机构提供可供选择的决策程序。然而，仍然有许多社会机构尚未听取SPR文献的建议，包括精神疾病的诊断、暴力行为的预测以及研究生和专业学校的入学。(4)改进心理学发展的预测模型特别适用于对具有多种不同证据的复杂现象进行推理。这是对那些负责在各个层面评估科学的人所面临的任务的完美准确描述。哲学家、历史学家和科学社会学家利用科学史上的大量数据，试图得出有关科学方法和理论的一般性教训。拨款审查委员会的那些科学家还通过考虑和权衡一些不同的证据线来评估各种项目的前景。具有讽刺意味的是，那些评估科学的人并没有使用有最强科学支持的方法。对于从科学史中吸取教训的个人(Faust&amp；Meehl，1992)，以及对科学资助建议进行评级的科学机构(NIH专家小组报告，1996年，特别是第5节)，都是如此。

A central issue in science studies is the relationship between evidence and hypothesis. But science studies is not the only discipline that investigates this relationship. Science studies has too long neglected the half-century's worth of fascinating and important empirical literature we call Ameliorative Psychology. A central finding of Ameliorative Psychology is that statistical prediction rules (or SPRs) are generally more reliable (and usually significantly more reliable) than human experts when it comes to making predictions about practically important matters (Meehl 1954, Sawyer 1966, Dawes 1994). This literature offers effective reasoning strategies that have undergone repeated and successful empirical tests. This proposal is to develop and articulate a view of human knowledge and reasoning that takes Ameliorative Psychology seriously as an exemplification of reasoning excellence. It intends to extract from the literature what science has learned about good reasoning, and then apply those lessons back to individual reasoners and social institutions, including the institutions of science. The new position is defined as strategic reliabilism: Reasoning excellence involves the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to robustly reliable reasoning strategies. Strategic reliabilism is an explicitly cost-benefit-based epistemology for real, bounded knowers. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and good reasoning. The proposal will liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of analytic philosophy and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science: Normative epistemology is to be properly understood and investigated as an essential, though often implicit, feature of cognitive science. The PIs will bring the skills and interests of the philosopher of science to epistemology by unearthing and clarifying the philosophical (in this case, epistemological) presuppositions of a particular branch of science (in this case, psychology). A novel theory about how best to reason about empirical matters, especially one that comes with a half-century's worth of empirical support, is bound to have broad and significant impact. Here are four such impacts: (1) The view of reasoning excellence we extract from Ameliorative Psychology naturally suggests a number of concrete useable lessons about how people can improve their reasoning about causation, diagnosis, and cost-benefit analysis (among other issues). The proposal's aim is to begin to employ the underutilized power of science to improve people's reasoning about important issues. (2) SPRs are currently being used by institutions to make some very important decisions that deeply affect people's lives (from medical diagnoses to credit decisions). The use of SPRs by social institutions is a significant (and largely ignored) way in which science is affecting society. The project will offer a clear articulation of the principles and assumptions underlying Ameliorative Psychology. (3) The view of reasoning excellence we extract from the Ameliorative Psychology can suggest alternative decision-procedures for social institutions. However, there are still many social institutions that have yet to heed the advice of the SPR literature, including diagnostics for mental illness, predicting violent behavior, and admissions to graduate and professional school. (4) The predictive models developed by Ameliorative Psychology are especially valuable for reasoning about complex phenomena about which one has many different lines of evidence. This is a perfectly accurate description of the task facing those who are charged with assessing science at various levels. Philosophers, historians and sociologists of science take the huge mass of data that is the history of science and try to draw general lessons about the methods and theories of science. Those scientists on grant review boards also make assessments about the promise of various projects by considering and weighing a number of different lines of evidence. It is ironic that those who assess science have not used methods that have the strongest scientific support. This is true for individuals extracting lessons from the history of science (Faust & Meehl 1992), and for scientific institutions rating scientific grant proposals (NIH Panel Report, 1996, especially section 5).