The Illusionary Comfort of a Warm Normative Theory

One of the most common tactics in Cognitive Science is the wholesale adoption of anexisting normative account as a theoretical basis for understanding some aspect ofhuman cognition or, indeed, as a yardstick for correct behaviour (see e.g., Eysenck & Keane, 1995, 2015). Research on the psychology of deduction (Johnson-Laird, 1999;Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; Evans, Newstead & Byrne, 1993; Oaksford & Chater,1998, 2007) has some of the most well-known examples of this tactic, where logicismhas argued that human thinking (1) reflects some internalized form of extensional,classical logic and (2) should be measured against classical logic as a normativesystem (Elquyam & Evans, 2011, pp. 234). Similarly, Oaksford & Chater (2007)advance Bayesian probability theory as a normative account of human rationality,though many disagree (Jones & Love, 2011; Bowers & Davis, 2012).