Abstract

Currently, Bayesian personalism is an influential view in epistemology and in the philosophy of science. Empiricists have long sought an inductive logic; Bayesians see themselves as having satisfied this goal. In recent years, though, psychologists studying cognitive errors have gained results that seem to indicate that people don't process information as Bayesians say they should. This has caused a lot of social scientists, who once presupposed a Bayesian view, to become much more agnostic about cognitive norms. Bayesians, on the other hand, respond that studies of cognitive errors have as much relevance here as they do in deductive logic, or in mathematics; Bayesianism may be descriptively inadequate, but this doesn't affect its normative status. ;The dissertation argues that this conflict between Bayesian norms and descriptive psychology casts doubt on those Bayesian norms. I argue that Bayesianism presupposes certain things about human psychology, and those presuppositions appear to be false. The focus of the dissertation is to become clear on just what those Bayesian presuppositions are, just what the descriptive realities are, and just why a retreat to the normative is inadequate. With respect to those descriptive realities, I combine a discussion on cognitive limitations, or "bounded rationality," and its implications, with a discussion on the presence of holistic features in our thought. My overall conclusion is to support a naturalized epistemology. In other words, an adequate normative epistemology must be based on an adequate account of human psychology.