You may have heard me drone on and on about this thing called "reflective thinking". We philosophers and cognitive scientists are preoccupied with it. However, the term 'reflection' is sometimes used in different ways by scholars. To unify, make sense of, and guide our research, I synthesized a unified account from hundreds of years of English language, from philosophers, and from cognitive science. The result is this paper.
In this episode, I'll read the paper, which explains the two key features of 'reflection' and how we measure them. This two-factor account of reflective thinking has implications for theories of rationality, self-knowledge, and dual-process theories.
Byrd, N. (2025). A Two-Factor Explication Of ‘Reflection’: Unifying, Making Sense Of, And Guiding The Philosophy And Science Of Reflective Reasoning. Res Philosophica. Preprint:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d628j
As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at
byrdnick.com/cv under "Publications".
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