Referring to probabilistic concepts (such as randomness, sampling, and probability distributions among others) is commonplace in contemporary explanations of how people learn and make decisions in the face of environmental unknowns. Here, we critically evaluate this practice and argue that such concepts should only play a relatively minor part in psychological explanations. To make this point, we provide a theoretical analysis of what people need to do in order to deal with unknown aspects of a typical decision-making task (a repeated-choice gamble). This analysis reveals that the use of probabilistic concepts in psychological explanations may and often does conceal essential, nonprobabilistic steps that people need to take to attempt to solve the problems that environmental unknowns present. To give these steps a central role, we recast how people solve these problems as a type of hypothesis generation and evaluation, of which using probabilistic concepts to deal with unknowns is one of many possibilities. We also demonstrate some immediate practical consequences of our proposed approach in two experiments. This perspective implies a shift in focus toward nonprobabilistic aspects of psychological explanations.

中文翻译：

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对学习和决策的非概率解释。

在当代解释人们如何在未知环境中学习和做出决定时，提及概率概念（例如随机性、抽样和概率分布等）是司空见惯的事情。在这里，我们批判性地评估了这种做法，并认为这些概念在心理学解释中只应发挥相对较小的作用。为了说明这一点，我们对人们需要做什么来处理典型决策任务（重复选择赌博）的未知方面进行了理论分析。该分析表明，在心理学解释中使用概率概念可能而且经常会隐藏人们为解决环境未知数所带来的问题而需要采取的重要的、非概率的步骤。为了让这些步骤发挥核心作用，我们将人们如何解决这些问题重塑为一种假设生成和评估，其中使用概率概念来处理未知数是众多可能性之一。我们还在两个实验中展示了我们提出的方法的一些直接的实际结果。这种观点意味着将重点转向心理学解释的非概率方面。