Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Part I: Developmental Psychology

2. Android Epistemology for Babies

i. Introduction
ii. Children
iii. The Platonic Theory of Cognitive Development
iv. The Theory Theory
v. Android Epistemology
vi. Issues

3. Another Way for Nerds to Make Babies: The Frame Problem and Bayes Nets in
Developmental Psychology
i. The Frame Problem
ii. A Toy Introduction to the Markov Assumption
iii. The Causal Markov Assumption
iv. Causal Bayes Nets
v. The Utility of Causal Bayes Nets
vi. Heuristics and Concept Formation
vii. Experiments
viii. Conclusion

Part 2: Adult Judgments of Causation

1. A Puzzling Experiment
i. The Baker Experiment
ii. The Baker Interpretation, Allen’s Criterion of Rationality and the Rescorla-
Wagner Model
iii. Spellman’s Interpretation and Its Difficulties
iv. The Problem for Psychologists

2. The Puzzle Solved

3. Marilyn Vos Savant Meets Rescorla-Wagner: A Crucial Experiment

i. Introduction
ii. Conditional Association and the Monte Hall Game
iii. Testing the Rescorla-Wagner Model

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4. Cheng Models
i. Introduction
ii. Cheng’s Model of Human Judgement of Generative Causal Power
iii. Preventive Causes
iv. Generative Interaction
v. Other Forms of Interaction
vi. Cheng Models as Bayes Nets
vii. Estimating the Causal Graph
viii. Conclusion
ix. Appendix

8. Learning Procedures
i. Introduction: The Virtues of Rescorla-Wagner
ii. Point Estimates of Causal Powers
iii. Adaptive Scores: The Bayesian Way
iv. Building on Patterns in the Data
v. Heuristics and Compromises
vi. Building on Sand

9. Representation and Rationality: The Case of Backwards Blocking

i. Representation
ii. Backwards Blocking
iii. Experiments
iv. The Cheng Model
v. A Bayesian Calculation with Cheng Models
vi. Bootstrapping to Backwards Blocking in Cheng Models
vii. Alternative Bayes Net Representations
viii. Conclusion

Part 3: Cognitive Neuropsychology

10. Cognitive Parts: from Freud to Farah

i. Parts, Beliefs and Habits: Classical Neuropsychology
ii. The Connectionist Alternative
iii. Freud
iv. Farah
v. Issues

11. Inferring Cognitive Architecture from Individual Case

Studies
i. The Issues
ii. Theories as Functional Diagrams and Graphs
iii. Formalities

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 iv. Discovery Problems and Success
v. An Illustration
vi. Complications
vii. Resource/PDP Models

12. Inferring Cognitive Architecture from Group Studies

i. Introduction
ii. An Inexhaustive Review
iii. Discovery Problems from Frequencies with Deterministic Input/Output
Behavior
iv. Discovery Problems with Indeterministic Input/Output Relations
v. Conclusion

13. The Explanatory Power of Lesioning Neural Nets

i. Introduction
ii. Networks and Graphs
iii. Feedforward Networks as Bayes Nets
iv. Feedforward Networks without Hidden Nodes
v. Hidden Nodes
vi. Recurrent Networks
vii. Implications

Part 4: Social Psychology and Psychometrics

14. Social Statistics and Genuine Inquiry: The Case of The Bell Curve
i. Introduction
ii. Varieties of Pseudo-Science
iii. Inquiry and Discovery
iv. The Bell Curve
v. Factor Analysis
vi. Regression and Discovery
vii. The Problems of Causal Inference
viii. Some Empirical Cases
ix. Projects and Attitudes

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 Preface

In a way, this book began thirty years ago. While I was at work on a methodological
history of psychoanalysis, Leon Kamin gave me the manuscript of his book on
intelligence testing, Science and IQ. That led me to read more on psychometrics and,
increasingly, cognitive psychology. I came to the conclusion that most of the deficiencies
in Freud’s science are deficiencies as well in contemporary theories of cognitive
architecture, whether founded or psychometrics or on now more fashionable techniques
in cognitive psychology, and so in a sense my history was unfair to Freud and his
followers. I rewrote the manuscript as an historical parallelism with a methodological
moral. While I thought its thesis was (and, sadly, still is) true, the result was thoroughly
mean, and the unhappy manuscript sat in my cupboard with the dishes for several years,
dragged out now and then for unsatisfactory repairs. In the meanwhile, my more
productive work concerned the causal interpretation of Bayes nets and computational
learning theory. In the 1980s, though conversations with several psychologists, especially
Martha Farah, and with Jeff Bub, I began to think there were important but unnoticed
connections between Bayes nets, computational learning theory, and contemporary
cognitive psychology. In 1998 I succumbed to the usual vanity of philosophers and
decided to publish a collection of my essays. No doubt as guilt payment for what must be
thousands of hours of refereeing, MIT press agreed to publish the book after I assured
them that every one of my relatives would buy at least one copy. One of the readers of the
collection was pleased with the few essays on psychology I included, and thought a book
that further developed their ideas would be valuable. As I began to prepare final revisions
for publication, I concluded the reader was correct, and wrote what turned out to be a
very different, and I hope more useful, book. Freud is still in the cupboard.

The methodological ideas in this book are indebted to Kevin Kelly, Dan Osherson, Judea
Pearl, Thomas Richardson, Richard Scheines, Peter Spirtes, Gregory Cooper and Scott

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Weinstein. My application of these ideas to psychology is indebted to years of
conversation with three psychologists, Patricia Cheng, Martha Farah and Alison Gopnik,
and to more recent conversations with Susan Johnson, John Watson, and Joshua
Tenenbaum. Chapter 3, in particular, emerged from joint work with Gopnik, and parts of
Chapter 7 from joint work with Cheng, to whom I am especially grateful for her patient
explanations and corrections of my many errors, mathematical and otherwise. Chapter 8
was prompted by discussions with Gopnik and Tenenbaum, and is really my side of a
correspondence with Tenenbaum. In chapter 6, I applied some results of brilliant work
on the Rescorla-Wagner model by my brilliant student, David Danks. Allen Hobson
posed to me the problem addressed in Chapter 12. There is a pleasing somethng—irony?
closure?—in the fact that aspects of Part II of this book are concerned with the Rescorla-
Wagner model of learning, which was inspired by a suggestion of Kamin’s, and aspects
of Part IV are concerned with inferences from intelligence tests, an issue to which Kamin
first introduced me. So, although I have not met or talked with him in twenty five years,
there is another debt.

Parts of Chapter 2 appeared in Synthese. A fragment of Chapter 3 appeared in “Bayes

Nets as Psychological Models,” in a volume, Explanation and Cognition, edited by Frank
Keil and Robert Wilson. Chapter 10 is an elaboration of an essay published in the British
Journal for Philosophy of Science in 1994. Chapter 12 was written in collaboration with
Thomas Richardson and Peter Spirtes and accepted for publication by Philosophy of
Science some years ago, subject to elaborations we did not want to take the trouble to
make, and which are unnecessary in the context of this volume. I thank Richardson and
Sprites for permitting me to publish it here. Chapter 13 is an amalgam of two essays on
the Bell Curve, one from Philosophy of Science and the other from a volume published
by Springer-Verlag.

I owe an institutional debt to Carnegie Mellon University, to the National Aeronautics

and Space Administration and to the NASA Ames Research Center, and to the National
Science Foundation, which supported work on Part III of this book. I have a personal
debt to Ken Ford, Ted Roush and Joseph Ramsey. Ford, who worked both at Ames and at

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the Insitute for Human and Machine Cognition at the University of West Florida,
subpoenaed my assistance for a project at Ames on autonomous robotic mineral
identification, which led to a grant from Ames that enabled Carnegie Mellon to free me
from teaching duties for a year. Thanks to Roush, at Ames, and to the heroic efforts of
Ramsey, who has been my programmer for the project, the work went very smoothly and
fruitfully, and permitted me marginal time over three months to work on this book.

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