How Do We Believe?

My first 30-odd years of research in cognitive science has been driven by an attempt to balance two facts about human thought that seem incompatible and two corresponding ways of understanding information processing. The facts are that, on one hand, human memories serve as sophisticated pattern recognition devices with great flexibility and an ability to generalize and predict as long as circumstances remain sufficiently familiar. On the other hand, we are capable of deploying an enormous variety of representational schemes that map closely onto articulable structure in the world and that support explanation even in unfamiliar circumstances. The contrasting ways of modeling such processes involve, first, more and more sophisticated associative models that capture progressively higher-order statistical structure and, second, more powerful representational languages for other sorts of structure, especially compositional and causal structure. My efforts to rectify these forces have taken me from the study of memory to induction and category knowledge to causal reasoning. In the process, I have consistently appealed to dual systems of thinking. I have come to realize that a key reason for our success as cognizers is that we rely on others for most of our information processing needs; we live in a community of knowledge. We make use of others both intuitively-by outsourcing much of our thinking without knowing we are doing it-and by deliberating with others.
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