Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-5mhkq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-19T07:47:49.901Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The psychology of judging: three experimental approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Wayne Martin
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Get access

Summary

One is always faced, then, with the unacceptable alternative of not attempting to study a primary phenomenological aspect of our human existence in relation to brain function because of the logical impossibility of direct verification by an external observer.

Libet 1985: 534

Judgment is, among other things, a characteristic capacity of certain intelligent organisms, and it is thus natural to turn to empirical psychology to investigate it. Our initial set of case studies are accordingly drawn from psychology and its history. In particular, I consider in this chapter three attempts to tackle the problem of judgment experimentally. Two cases come from modern neuropsychological research; the third is by now ancient history: the eighteenth-century psychological experiments due to David Hume. The three experimental approaches diverge dramatically in their methodologies and in their conception of psychology, yet each exhibits the pattern which is the subject of this book: the entanglement of logical, psychological, and phenomenological constraints in the theory of judgment. My discussion aims both to document these entanglements and to show how, in at least two cases, they lead to experimental failure. But I also seek to extract positive results, exhibiting a substantive logical constraint on the theory of judgment (Hume's content identity condition) and a variety of patterns whereby experimentalists have sought to integrate the various faces of judgment.

Type
Chapter
Information
Theories of Judgment
Psychology, Logic, Phenomenology
, pp. 14 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×