What is a decision?

A conclusion or resolution reached after consideration

(Oxford Dictionary).

A choice that you make about something after thinking

about several possibilities (Cambridge Dictionary).

The act or process of deciding, determination, as of a

question or doubt, by making a judgment.

The act of reaching a conclusion or making up ones

mind.
 What is decision making?
The cognitive process resulting in the selection
of a belief and/or a course of action among
several alternative possibilities (Wikipedia
definition).

A reasoning or emotional process which can be

rational or irrational and can be based on
explicit or tacit assumptions.
 What is decision making?
All choices arise from both the heart and the head.
The heart provides the passion and the head
reasons Choices based on reasoning but lacking
any desire are vacuous. But desire without reason
is impotent (Allingham, 2002).

According to Aristotle (384-322 BCE):

the origin of choice is desire and reasoning with
a view to an end this is why choice cannot exist
without reason choice is deliberate desire.
 Reason vs desire
David Hume (1711-1776):
Reason is the slave of passions a passion can
never, in any sense, be called unreasonable.
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the whole world to the scratching
of my finger.

Reasonableness is a property of patterns of

choices, not of individual choices.
 Reason and reasoning
A cause, explanation, or justification for an action or
event (Oxford Dictionary).
The ability of a healthy mind to think and make
judgements (Cambridge Dictionary).
Reason or reasoning is associated with thinking,
cognition, and intellect.
According to Kompridis (2000) reason is,
the capacity for consciously making sense of things,
applying logic for establishing and verfying facts, and
changing or justifying practices, institutions, and
beliefs based on new or existing information.
 Problem of Scientific Reasoning
What exactly is the nature of scientific reasoning?
How much confidence should we place in the
inferences scientists make?
Deduction
Deductive Inference: If the premisses are true, then the
conclusion must be true too.
Example:
The first two statements are called
the premisses of the inference.
The third statement is called the
conclusion.
Premiss: A statement or idea that is accepted as being true and that is used as the basis of
an argument (www.merriam-webster.com, 2012). 6
 Deductive reasoning
What makes the inference deductive is the
existence of an appropriate relation between
premisses and conclusion.
If the premisses are true, the conclusion must
be true too.
Whether the premisses are actually true is a
different matter, which does not affect the
status of the inference as deductive.
If the premisses are wrong, than the conclusion
can be wrong too.
Research Methods - Week 1 7
 Inductive Reasoning
The first five eggs in the box were rotten.
All the eggs have the same best-before date on them.
Therefore the sixth egg will be rotten too.
This piece of reasoning is not deductive, for the
premisses do not entail the conclusion.
Even if the first five eggs in the box were rotten, this
does not guarantee that the sixth egg will be rotten
too.
It is logically possible for the premiss of this inference
to be true and yet the conclusion false.
This is known as an inductive inference.
Research Methods - Week 1 8
 Inductive Reasoning
In inductive inference, or inductive reasoning, we move
from premisses about objects we have examined to
conclusions about objects we haven't examined.
Although deductive reasoning is a much safer activity
than inductive reasoning, scientists frequently make use
of inductive reasoning.
Geneticists tell that Downs syndrome (DS) sufferers
have an extra chromozome. How do they know this?
They examine a large number of DS sufferers and
observe that each have an additional chromosome.
They then infer inductively the conclusion that all DS
sufferers have an extra chromosome.
Research Methods - Week 1 9
 Inductive Reasoning
Newton did not arrive at his principle of universal
gravitation by examining every single body in the whole
universe.
Rather, he saw that the principle held true for the
planets and the sun, and for objects of various sorts
moving near the earth's surface.
From this data he inferred that the principle held true
for all bodies.
Again, this inference was obviously an inductive one.
The fact that Newton's principle holds true for some
bodies doesn't guarantee that it holds true for all bodies.
Research Methods - Week 1 10
 Inductive vs deductive reasoning
It's obvious that science relies heavily on inductive
reasoning.
But, remarkably, Popper claimed that scientists only
need to use deductive inferences.
Popper argued that although it is not possible to prove
that a scientific theory is true from a limited sample, it is
possible to prove that a theory is false.
Popper's argument was strong when scientists are only
interested in showing that certain theories are false.
But, what would a scientist who collected experimental
data to convince people that her own theory is true do?
Wouldnt she have to use inductive reasoning?
Research Methods - Week 1 11
 Humes problem
Hume pointed out that an inductive inference rests on the
uniformity of nature (UN) assumption.
UN: Objects we havent examined will be similar, in the
relevant respects, to objects of the same sort that we have
examined.
But we cannot prove that UN is true, and we
cannot produce empirical evidence for its truth.
UN is itself an inductive argument, and so itself depends on
the UN assumption.
So our inductive inferences rest on an assumption about
the world for which we have no good grounds.
Hume concludes that our confidence in induction is just
blind faith - it admits of no rational justification whatever.
Research Methods - Week 1 12
The man who doesnt believe in induction
To argue that induction is
trustworthy because it has worked
well up to now is to reason in an
inductive way.
Such an argument would carry
no weight with someone who
doesnt already trust induction.
That was Humes fundamental
point.
But thihk what would happen if
we didnt belive in inductive reasoning 13
 The Wheel of Science:
Induction & Deduction

Babbie 14
 Inference to the best solution (IBS)
The cheese has disappeared apart from a few crumbs
Scratching noises were heard last night
Therefore, the cheese was eaten by a mouse
It is obvious that this inference is non-deductive: the
premisses do not entail the conclusion.
The cheese could have been stolen by someone, who
cleverly left a few crumbs to make it look like the
handiwork of a mouse.
The scratching noises could be due to the boiler
overheating.
Nonetheless, the inference is clearly a reasonable one.
15
 Inference to the best solution (IBS)
After all, people do not normally steal cheese, and boilers
do not tend to overheat. Whereas mice do normally eat
cheese when they get the chance, and make sounds.
So although we cannot be certain that the mouse
hypothesis is true, on balance it looks quite plausible.
It is the best way of accounting for the available data.
Reasoning of this sort is known as inference to the best
explanation (IBE).
Scientists frequently use IBE (Darwin, Einstein etc.)
lf we want use IBE we need to decide which of the
competing hypotheses provides the best explanation.
16
 Occams razor & parsimony
But what criteria to determine this?
A popular answer is that the best explanation
is the simplest or the most parsimonious one.
Consider again the cheese example.
Preferring a theory that explains the data using
fewest number of causes does seem sensible.
On the other hand, how do we know that the universe is
simple rather than complex?
Is there any objective reason for thinking that such a
theory is more likely to be true than a less simple theory?
How can we know that Occams razor is the sharpest? 17