Coltheart Max, Davies Martin
Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford OX1 4JF, UK; Philosophy Department, Monash University, Clayton VIC 3800, Australia.
Conscious Cogn. 2021 Jan;87:103037. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2020.103037. Epub 2020 Dec 1.
People acquire new beliefs in various ways. One of the most important of these is that new beliefs are acquired as a response to experiencing events that one did not expect. This involves a form of inference distinct from both deductive and inductive inference: abductive inference. The concept of abduction is due to the American pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce. Davies and Coltheart (in press) elucidated what Peirce meant by abduction, and identified two problems in his otherwise promising account requiring solution if that account were to become fully workable. Here we propose solutions to these problems and offer an explicit cognitive model of how people derive new beliefs from observations of unexpected events, based on Peirce's work and Sokolov's ideas about prediction error triggering new beliefs. We consider that this model casts light not only upon normal processes of belief formation but also upon the formation of delusional beliefs.
人们通过各种方式获得新信念。其中最重要的一种方式是，新信念是作为对经历未预期事件的一种反应而获得的。这涉及一种不同于演绎推理和归纳推理的推理形式：溯因推理。溯因概念归功于美国实用主义哲学家C. S. 皮尔斯。戴维斯和科尔特哈特（即将出版）阐明了皮尔斯所说的溯因的含义，并指出了他那原本很有前景的解释中存在的两个问题，若要使该解释完全可行就需要解决这些问题。在此，我们提出这些问题的解决方案，并基于皮尔斯的著作以及索科洛夫关于预测误差引发新信念的观点，提供一个明确的认知模型，说明人们如何从未预期事件的观察中推导出新信念。我们认为，这个模型不仅能阐明信念形成的正常过程，还能说明妄想信念的形成。
