Thinking Uncertainty across Possible Worlds

This chapter examines probabilistic reasoning as a key domain in which human thought confronts uncertainty. While early research in the 1960s depicted individuals as “intuitive statisticians” capable of Bayesian evaluations, studies from the 1970s onward emphasized systematic deviations, portraying people as heuristic-driven rather than normative thinkers. These contrasting perspectives generated competing paradigms but continued to rely on probability theory as an external normative standard. More recent approaches, however, have shifted attention to the mental representations individuals construct when faced with probabilistic tasks. This reconceptualization highlights how judgements of probability are shaped not only by formal criteria but also by contextual factors such as expectations, prior knowledge, and communicative intentions. Probabilistic reasoning is thus revealed as a complex and situated activity, in which expressions of uncertainty both reflect and influence real-life decisions. The chapter argues for a representational and contextualized account that reconciles normative models with human reasoning.