"Reason and Inquiry is a major contribution to the philosophy of mind, the psychology of reasoning, and cognitive science, with implications for linguistics, epistemology, and decision theory. The erotetic theory looks set to be a key player in future debates on the nature of rationality."
TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON
Wykeham Professor of Logic
University of Oxford
"An insightful treatment of reason and rationality, explaining many puzzles and integrating many viewpoints."
STEVEN PINKER
Johnstone Professor of Psychology
Harvard University
"It is easy for researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get excited with our technical achievements and lose track of the big questions: what is intelligence, and how does it work? This thought provoking and wide-ranging book prompts us to look again at our field: to revisit the most basic questions surrounding our endeavour, and, perhaps most importantly, to consider new directions for the future."
MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE
Co-Director for AI
The Alan Turing Institute
ABOUT
Fulford Clarendon Professor
of Philosophy and Cognitive Science
University of Oxford
Senior Research Associate
Institute for Ethics in AI
University of Oxford
Fulford Fellow
St. Catherine's College
Ph.D. (Philosophy and Neuroscience) Princeton University
B.A. Pomona College
I work on the human capacity for reasoning and decision-making, and how it relates to artificial agents and large language models like GPT. My recent book Reason and Inquiry presents a theory of this capacity and its two-faced nature: On the one hand, we are subject to systematic fallacies and framing effects, empirically documented in psychology and behavioural economics. On the other hand, we largely get things right and are capable of incredible feats of rationality. I argue that our minds naturally aim at resolving issues or answering questions as directly as possible, and if we are inquisitive enough in the process, we can get the kind of rationality required for science, philosophy, and classical economic agents as a special case. I am also interested moral judgment and in definitions of intelligence, both in humans and in artificial intelligence (AI). I regularly collaborate with computer scientists on these topics. I have also had many past collaborations with colleagues from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and environmental systems.
Updates
Interview with Forbes Italia, July 7, 2023
May 4, 2023 - Lunch talk at Imbue (Generally Intelligent) in San Francisco.
May 4, 2023 - Talk with Vincent Wang-Maścianica at Thomas Icard's Language Group at Stanford.
April 25, 2023 - First meeting of grad seminar with Will Davies, "Topics in Minds and Machines: Perception, Cognition, and ChatGPT." 11am Ryle Room.
March 30, 2023 - New Paper (with Vincent Wang-Maścianica): We found production of human-like fallacious judgments to increase from GPT-3 to GPT-4, even as it got much better at human-like correct judgments too. Perhaps no surprise, since GPT is trained on human text. #HumansInHumansOut https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17276
January 17, 2023 - First meeting of "A Theory of Reason" graduate seminar with Sean Moss (Computer Science)
Research
AI, Reasoning and Decision-Making
Moral judgment and Delusional thinking
Attention and Perception
(selected for symposium at www.philosophyofbrains.com, replies by Chris Mole, Felipe de Brigard, Sebastian Watzl, et al.)
Language
Teaching
I regularly offer the following graduate seminars:
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A Theory of Reason: Philosophy, Psychology, and Algorithms
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Topics in Minds and Machines: Perception, Cognition, and ChatGPT
I regularly offer undergraduate instruction on the following, among other topics:
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science
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Philosophy of AI
I have offered doctoral supervision in both philosophy and computer science in a variety of topics including language, consciousness, and moral judgment.