Judgment, Choices and Reasoning Fallacies

Judgment and the elements of Reasoning

Analysis of reasoning Analysis of judgment Relation of concept and judgment Order of development of the cognitive processes Judgment as primitive cognitive activity

Analysis of reasoning
reasoning is present from the beginning of conscious life in the human being, involving perception and memory and imagination and conception may define it broadly and provisionally as purposive thinking, that is to say, thinking carried on in the interests of some plan which we wish to execute, some problem which we wish to solve, some difficulty which we wish to surmount. to involve the selection of certain ideas out of all those supplied us by the problem, the manipulation of these ideas in accordance with previously acquired habits, and the attainment of the solution by a proper combination of these two processes.

 A judgment, when put into words, is what logicians call a proposition, and what grammarians call a sentence. that a process of reasoning, such as that of our illustration, contains concepts combined in the form of judgments. judgment is a new mental operation to which we must now devote our attention. Judgment and verbal expression; if the judgment is in any measure equivalent to a proposition or a sentence, we ought to gain assistance, in the distinguishing of its principal forms, from the classifications of the grammarians and logicians In the judgment, " the book is heavy," we have the concept heavy united to the concept book verbal precipitates of judgment we seem then to have two or more ideas mentally united in meanings which may imply either the postulated union or severance of the objects to which they refer

Analysis of judgment

Relation of concept and judgment

the origin of concepts spring out of the mind's effort to mark off, and render distinct, the various meanings some specific instances of the attainment and development of a concept, an instructive fact concerning the relation between conception and judgment E.g the concept of bad, badness Such a mental act obviously has implicit in it the beginnings of judgment, i. e., the assertion of a relation between two mental elements. When, with increasing age, language finally comes to our assistance, we are easily able to apprehend the usage of our elders, and we straightway apply the term "bad" to all acts of a certain character Judge according to large measure of confidence in its correctness

Order of development of the cognitive processes

Judgment, conception, memory, imagination, perception are in one form or another present in consciousness from the very first; and each process, which we have described and analysed under one or another of these names, really involves each of the other processes. At certain moments consciousness presents itself as dominantly engaged in the way we call perception, sometimes in the way we call imagination. But each operation involves the other, and it would hardly be possible to point to a stage in development where one was obviously present and the other obviously and altogether absent. situation as regards its primary or secondary nature, its early or late appearance, in the history of the individual consciousness the mental operation of cognising the object is essentially equivalent to the assertion, "this is a chair," or "this is a thing to sit (231) upon. Another sound may represent judgments in the form of a command, such as " I-am-hot-and-I-wish-you-would-take-the-blanket-off."

Judgment as primitive cognitive activity

original form all judgment is essentially a reaction upon immediately present perceptual experiences Undoubtedly, rude judgments in which memory and imagination play leading roles may occur at a very early period the highly developed ideational judgments, the recognition, or assertion, of relations, it seems impossible to deny that the simplest case of perception, with its connection of a first sensory stimulation with something already familiar, is also implicitly, at least, of the same genus as the judgment.

 judgment does really deal with the analysis of ideational (or perceptual) experiences Judgment is, then, in its most explicit forms, undoubtedly a process in which we synthesise concepts in the course of noting and asserting relations. the synthesis may bring out relations of which previously we- were not clearly cognisant. From this point of view judgment is not so much a matter of creating wholly new mental material as it is a matter of ordering our mental equipment in the most efficient possible manner

Distinguishing judgment from decision making

Hogarth (1997)
Decision making influenced by economist and statisticians research on how decisions to be made. Focusing on how people decide on a course of action Judgment has been influenced by research on perception Judgment are usually regarded as assessment, estimates, that provide input to decision making Judgments vary in accuracy (meximising accuracy), decisions vary in optimality ( maximising returns

 Judgment are assessed in terms of how accurate they are, while decisions are assessed in terms of their potential consequences

Distinguishing problem solving from judgment and decision making

Problem solving task solution- effective Optimal decisions are unlikely to have same effectiveness each time that theyare implemented. People make decisions in unpredictable environments, but Solve problems in predictable ones

Different types of judgment task

Studies indicated several types of judgment task
Naturalistic decision making, Effect of stress on judgement E.g Funk (1995) defines different types of task in terms of situation and system factors
Hammond (1996, 2000) more subject-based approach: different task are defined in terms of the type of cognitive processing Theres also studies of multiple cue probability learning, suggest the number of cues and the intercorrelations between them have different effect on judgements

Cognitive process underlying judgment and decision making

Choices and reasoning fallacies

Research: Possibilities on putting the three concepts together in research

Identification of informal reasoning fallacies as a function of epistemological level, grade level and cognitive ability Weinstock, P, Neuman, Y and Glassner a (2006) Journal of Educational Psychology; Vol 89, No 2, 327 - 341