Michael A Bishop
Biographic Data
| ID | 1049928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael A Bishop |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bishop |
| SIGNATURE | BISHOP M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Inquiry Under Bounds
All theories of rationality face a challenge. Our intuitions about rationality make unrealistic demands of us. So how can a theory take our imperfect reasoning to be rational while at the same time preserving our unrealistic intuitions? David Thorstad has written a book that tries to square this circle. His questions are pressing and important. His grasp of the relevant literature is enviable. His ability to bring a wide range of philosophical an…
The Epistemic Virtues of a Closed Mind
A financial confidence game (or “con”) aims to separate you from your money. An epistemic con aims to influence social policy by recruiting you to spread doubt and falsehood about well-established claims. You can’t be conned if you close your wallet to financial cons and your mind to epistemic cons. Easier said than done. The epistemic con has two elements. First are magic bullet arguments, which purport to identify the crucial fact that proves s…
Strategic Reliabilism
Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behi…
Fast and Frugal Heuristics1
A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the lon…
Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment
This book presents a new approach to epistemology (the theory of human knowledge and reasoning). Its approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical…
Epistemology and the psychology of human judgment
The theory theory thrice over
Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough
Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the suc…
In Praise of Epistemic Irresponsibility
Why Thought Experiments Are Not Arguments
Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode con…
The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science
The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, t…
Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough
Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the suc…
In Praise of Epistemic Irresponsibility
Why Thought Experiments Are Not Arguments
Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode con…
Fast and Frugal Heuristics1
A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the lon…
The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science
The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, t…
Strategic Reliabilism
Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behi…
The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science
The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, t…
Why Thought Experiments Are Not Arguments
Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode con…
In Praise of Epistemic Irresponsibility
The theory theory thrice over
Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough
Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the suc…
Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment
This book presents a new approach to epistemology (the theory of human knowledge and reasoning). Its approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical…
Epistemology and the psychology of human judgment
Fast and Frugal Heuristics1
A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the lon…
Strategic Reliabilism
Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behi…
The Epistemic Virtues of a Closed Mind
A financial confidence game (or “con”) aims to separate you from your money. An epistemic con aims to influence social policy by recruiting you to spread doubt and falsehood about well-established claims. You can’t be conned if you close your wallet to financial cons and your mind to epistemic cons. Easier said than done. The epistemic con has two elements. First are magic bullet arguments, which purport to identify the crucial fact that proves s…
Inquiry Under Bounds
All theories of rationality face a challenge. Our intuitions about rationality make unrealistic demands of us. So how can a theory take our imperfect reasoning to be rational while at the same time preserving our unrealistic intuitions? David Thorstad has written a book that tries to square this circle. His questions are pressing and important. His grasp of the relevant literature is enviable. His ability to bring a wide range of philosophical an…
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (5 works) · Mathematics (4 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (4 works) · Philosophy of science (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (3 works) · Mathematical economics (3 works) · Epistemic virtue (2 works)