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joaoeira's review against another edition
5.0
Probably best book I'll read this year. Need to go let it rest for a while then go through my notes one more time, and I'll write something about the ideas presented here.
albcorp's review against another edition
5.0
This book is a masterpiece. It presents a thesis that has great impact and application. It is scholarly and even in its arguments. However, to achieve its full impact, it probably requires the reader to have some previous exposure to reasoning or the linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy. If you meet these criteria I consider this a must-read book.
icywaterfall's review against another edition
4.0
Psychologists say that reason is flawed because they have taken fron granted that the job of reasoning is to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions. Reason is thought of a cognitive superpower bestowed upon us by evolution (first enigma), and on top of this, it is a flawed superpower (second enigma). This book tackles these two questions. In answer to the first enigma; reason is first and foremost a social competence that can brings with it huge intellectual advances specifically by reasoning with others. Considering reason as a mechanism that draws intuitive inferences about reasons solves the first enigma. Reason is not a superpower grafted onto the mind of a primate. To resolve the second enigma, we will demonstrate how apparent biases that have been described as deplorable flaws are features well adapted to its argumentative function.
- There are those who argue that reason is flawed and those who argue that reason is genius. Do you doubt the power of reason? Look at the sciences, look at Eratosthenes’ calculation of the circumference of the earth. But that is exceptional reasoning; ordinary reasoning doesn’t lead us far, and it often leads in the wrong direction! People frequently make logical errors based on how questions are framed; clear evidence that reason is flawed. But take a visual illusion. This is evidence of the fact that our perception is well adapted to the task of making sense of 3-D environment in which we live, not necessarily of interpreting 2-D images intended to trick us. Reasoning is similar; people fail at logical tasks because their reasoning is adapted to the task of reasoning about the social world, not dry logical problems. But as the argument between these two camps for an against reason, we need to ask: is reason really a thing?
- It was thought that logic describes good or correct reasoning. But logic and the psychology of reasoning have moved in different directions recently. The most important recent theoretical development has been dual process theory, the idea that there are two quite distinct basic types of processes involved in inference. One side is that which is instinctual in animals and intuitive in humans; on the other, features associated with higher-order conscious mental activity. It was thought that this might resolve the second enigma (flawed superpower); Type 1 processes are heuristic shortcuts that mainly lead to right judgment, but in non-standard situations they produce biased and mistaken answers. But Type 2 answers can also be a source of biases and even errors, so this enigma is not solved. So how can we solve this problem?
- Hume said that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and we agree. Just like other animals, humans are capable of forming expectations and drawing various kinds of inferences in an unreflective way. Inference = the extraction of new information from information already available, whatver the process. Reasoning is the process of pursuing this goal by attending to reasons. Humans cannot spend a minute of their waking life without making inferences, but can go days without engaging in reasoning. All animals perform inferences, even if they may be automatic and unconscious computations. There are three basic properties of all cognitive systems:
Cognition is a means for organisms that can move around to react appropriately to risks and opportunities presented by their environment. Brains are going-to-places-things; brains are for doing things.
Cognition involves going well beyond the information available to the senses. To integrate sensory information and respond appropriately, cognition must draw inferences about the way things are, and what to do.
Inferences may be performed by specialised mechanisms that deal with one task.
Perception performs inferences all the time, but these are typically unconscious. Visual illusions surprise us because we usually take our unconscious inferences as what there really is out there. In perception, inference is always at work. Similarly, with reasoning, the inferences involved in comprehension are done as effortlessly and without any awareness of the process. Comprehension always involves inference even if we are not aware of it. Intuitions contrast with the conclusions of conscious reasoning where we know how and why we arrive at them. Intuitions are judgments that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justify them. Intuition is characterised as knowing without knowing how one knows. When we have an intuition, we experience it as something our mind produced but without having any experience of the process of its production. Intuitions, even if they are not a basic type of mechanism, may well be a distinctive metacognitive category. When intuitions ‘appear’ to us in consciousness, despite having little or no knowledge of the reasons for our intuitions, it is taken for granted that there exist reasons that justify them. Intuitive inferences are inferences, the output of which happens to be experienced as intuitions.
- Does learning rely on specialised inferential mechanisms that may have some instinctual basis? A learning instinct (as suggested by Peter Marler) is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge (such as language for humans). Instinct could be seen as natural expertises, and expertises could be seen as acquired instinct. Face recognition and norm-obeying behaviour are universal features of human social life; meaning that it is plausible that the cognitive mechanisms involved have been in good part shaped by biological evolution. Evolved and expert cognitive skills exploit specific brain areas; much of their operations are fast, quasi-automatic. Mechanisms on the instinct-expertise continuum are called modules; autonomous mechanisms with a history, function, and procedures appropriate to this function. How can these individually dumb modules combine into smarter but limited modules that provide for the kind of superior intelligence that humans ascribe to themselves? The view they favour is that inference is achieved by a coalition of relatively autonomous modules that have evolved in the species and develop in individuals so as to solve problems. The discovery of unconscious inference presented a challenge to the classical view of the mind as unitary and principled. How does unconscious inference proceed? Al-Haytham realised that there is a continuum of cases between conscious and unconscious inference, but people don’t reason using logic unconsciously; all inference involves representations and procedures; representations are material things, (activations of groups of neurons in a brain, ink on paper) and what makes a material thing a representation is its function of providing an organism with information about some state of affairs. Inferential procedures apply to representations; what makes a procedure inferential is that it has the function of making more information available for processing. When scholars have looked at unconscious reasoning, they have assumed it takes the form of conscious reasoning; but this is unfounded dogma. What makes this non-logical unconscious inference possible is the existence in the world of dependable regularities. No regularities, no inference. No inference, no action. A cognitive system can contain the same information twice: in a procedure that directly exploits the information, and in a representation that serves as a premise for other kinds of procedures. You can have a reflex fear of snakes and the knowledge that snakes are dangerous.
- Human minds are articulation of many modules; but if reason is based on intuitive inference, what are the intuitions about? Reason is based on intuitive inference about reasons. Humans represent many things in their thoughts, and they recognise that they are doing so. Representations constitute a special ontological category for which humans have specialised inferential mechanisms. These are representations of representations, or metarepresentations. There are mental representations (beliefs, opinions, intentions, etc) and public representations (spoken or written utterances, pictures, etc). These representations are such because of their meaning or content; so what cognitive mechanisms do we have for drawing inference about representations? Humans are capable of mindreading (Theory of Mind) and we tend to monitor our social environment; we open, maintain, and update mental files on people we know and store information concerning what their mental files contain. Our highly social minds track and anticipate what happens in the phiysical environment and what happens in the minds of others. However, our intuitions about things (numbers) are not the same as our intuitions about their representations (numerals). Our intuitions about representations exploit properties of the representations that need not match properties of the things represented, but they may nevertheless be a source of insight about the things represented themselves. Mindreading informs you, through your intuitions, about what others believe, and therefore about the content of their beliefs too. When the woman in the waiting room looks at her watch and sighs, you guess not only that she believes that the doctor is keeping her waiting but also that the doctor is keeping her waiting. Metarepresentational modules provide information not only about the representations metarepresented but also, indirectly, about the things these representations represent. So while these modules have very specific domains, they may nevertheless have a different and much wider virtual domain corresponding to the things represented. Reasoning is based on a metarepresentational module that provides intuitions not about the world in general but about reasons. Reasons are a kind of representation, and can be about anything or any combination of things in the world. Reasoning can be both specialised in its operations and general in its import.
- Most reasons are post-hoc rationalisations. There is a difference between objective and psychological reasons: an objective reason is a fact that objectively supports some conclusion; these are without causal powers. A psychological reason is a mental representation of an objective reason; these are mental representations so do play a causal role in people’s lives. The main role of reasons is not to motivate or guide us in reaching conclusions but to explain and justify after the fact the conclusions we have reached. In order to believe or decide something, we do not need ot pay any attention to reasons; purely intuitive inference, which generates so many of our beliefs and decisions, operates in a way that is opaque to us. Nisbett and Wilson argue that the way we explain our own behaviour isn’t that different from the way we would explain that of others. We are mistaken in assuming that we have direct introspective knowledge of our mental states and of the processes through which they are produced. It is not that we commonly misidentify our true reasons; we are mistaken in assuming that all our inferences are guided by reasons in the first place. Do implicit reasons (unconscious reasons) actually exist though? No. A fact is an objective reason not for one conclusion but for an unbounded variety of conclusions. The representation of a fact is a psychological reason only if this fact is represented as supporting some specific conclusion. Unconscious inferences are produced by modules that don’t represent their reasons or conclusions in any logical manner. Modules are not guided by unconscious psychological reasons. So the point of reasons isn’t to guide the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions; what are reasons for? Reasons justify and explain our behaviour in the eyes of other people; they are social constructs and are produced primarily for social consumption.
- Retrospective reasons justify decisions already taken and beliefs already held. Prospective reasons are arguments in favour of new decisions and beliefs. There is no dividing line between these two as retrospective and prospective reasons rely on one and the same module that delivers intuitions about reasons. How are reasons inferred? They must ultimately be grounded in intuitive inference, which is made possible by regularities in the world. One of the main claims of this book is that reasoning is not an alternative to intuitive inference; reasoning is a use of intuitive inferences about reasons, unlike the dual process theories of Kahneman and Tversky. What renders some conclusions intuitive is neither their content nor the way in which they are produced, but the kind of confidence we have in these conclusions. Our intuitions don’t just feel right; we feel that we are right in coming up with them. Intuitions are thoughts that you may assert on your own authority without an argument or an appeal to authority. Some of our metarepresentational intuitions are not just about our degree of confidence in our first order intuitions but they are about the reasons for these intuitions. We care about our reasons for our intuitions when they are challenged by others or further experience. It’s not that we had reasons in mind when reaching intuitive conclusions; but we typically construct our reasons after reaching the conclusions. The attribution of reasons, to others or oneself needn’t be more than a superficial affair; we search the environment or memory for some plausible piece of information that could be invoked to explain an intuition and assume that this is the actual reason for one’s intuition. We don’t derive intuitive conclusions from reasons; we infer what our reasons must have been from the conclusions we intuitively arrived at; we construct our reasons as an after-the-fact justification. Is the search for reasons a purely cosmetic affair that tries to dress up our naked biases? No; we want our reasons to justify us in the eyes of others, and because they will be assessed, reasons may be rethought and revised to be better accepted. Giving reasons to justify oneself and reacting to the reasons given by others are a way to establish reputations and coordinate expectations. What these reasons help do is represent our inferences as rational in a different, socially relevant sense of the term where rational means, being based on reasons that can be articulated and assessed.
- What if you don’t have any intuitive inferences about a question? If the conclusion embedded in an argument is not an intuitive conclusion, it is a reasoned or reflective conclusion accepted because of higher-order thinking about it. All reflective conclusions in human thinking are indirect outputs of a mechanism of intuitive inference about reasons. Recognising a syllogism as valid and sound isn’t a sufficient reason to accept its conclusion; only if you have independent reasons to accepts its premises may a sound syllogism give you a reason to accept its conclusion. Reasoning itself involves higher-order intuitions about how lower-order intuitions may support some conclusion. Moreover, the true function of reasoning has been misunderstood. Evolution explains function; when the effects of a heritable trait are more beneficial to the reproductive success, then this trait is likely to propagate over generations. Reason is not a means for individuals to acquire superior knowledge and to make better decisions; Reason evolved as a response to problems encountered in social interaction rather than in solitary thinking. Reason fulfills two main functions; one function helps solve a major problem of coordination by producing justifications. The other function helps solve a major problem of communication by producing arguments. To achieve the degree of fine-grained coordination that their multiple forms of communication require, humans need mutual expectations that have to be constantly updated to remain reliable. Knowing what to expect of others is crucial and is achieved by norms at the sociological level and understanding the mental states of others at the psychological level. By giving reasons to explain and justify yourself, you do several things; you influence the way people read your mind, judge your behaviour, and speak of you. You engage in a conversation where others may accept your justifications, question them, and invoke reasons of their own, from which shared norms actually may emerge. In these interactions about interactions, reasons are central. Because communication is so advantageous to humans, strong pressure must have favoured the development of a suite of mechanisms for assessing whom to believe and what to believe. Reasoning is beneficial to addressees by allowing them to better evaluate possibly valuable information that they would not accept on trust. We construct arguments when we are trying to convince others, and we evaluate the arguments given by others as a means of recognising good ideas and rejecting bad ones. Reasoning involves two capacities, that of producing arguments and that of evaluating them, These two capacities jointly constitute one of the two main functions of reasoning; the argumentative function.
- The experience of surprise corresponds to the sudden mobilisation of cognitive resources to readjust expectations that have just been challenged. If reason is an instrument of individual cognition then it should be biased towards information that violates our expectations; but the confirmation bias doesn’t confirm this view. People find it hard to look for counterevidence but only when what is being challenged is their own opinion. Reasoning works to find reasons for our ideas against ideas we oppose. But if the function of reasoning is to justify one’s actions or to convince others, then it should have a confirmation (or myside) bias. Further, there is an asymmetry between how people produce reasons - they are relatively lax about quality control - and how they evaluate others’ reasons - they are much more demanding. This picture of reason fits with the predictions of the interactionist approach. When people have weak or conflicting intuitions, reason drives them toward the decisions which are easier to justify, which is also a prediction of the interactionist approach to reason. Just as we evaluate others, others evaluate us. It is important for us that others have a good opinion of us, so that they would be more willing to cooperate in the future. Our reasons for acting the way we do shouldn’t use be good reasons; they should be reasons that are easily recognised as good.
- In the right interactive context, reason works. It allows people to change each other’s minds so they end up endorsing better beliefs and making better decisions. When it comes to problem solving, groups outperform individuals all the time. For a wide variety of tasks argumentation allows people to reach better answers. This is because, again and again, we see people changing their minds when confronted with good arguments, people reach better conclusions after debating the issue with their peers.
- There are those who argue that reason is flawed and those who argue that reason is genius. Do you doubt the power of reason? Look at the sciences, look at Eratosthenes’ calculation of the circumference of the earth. But that is exceptional reasoning; ordinary reasoning doesn’t lead us far, and it often leads in the wrong direction! People frequently make logical errors based on how questions are framed; clear evidence that reason is flawed. But take a visual illusion. This is evidence of the fact that our perception is well adapted to the task of making sense of 3-D environment in which we live, not necessarily of interpreting 2-D images intended to trick us. Reasoning is similar; people fail at logical tasks because their reasoning is adapted to the task of reasoning about the social world, not dry logical problems. But as the argument between these two camps for an against reason, we need to ask: is reason really a thing?
- It was thought that logic describes good or correct reasoning. But logic and the psychology of reasoning have moved in different directions recently. The most important recent theoretical development has been dual process theory, the idea that there are two quite distinct basic types of processes involved in inference. One side is that which is instinctual in animals and intuitive in humans; on the other, features associated with higher-order conscious mental activity. It was thought that this might resolve the second enigma (flawed superpower); Type 1 processes are heuristic shortcuts that mainly lead to right judgment, but in non-standard situations they produce biased and mistaken answers. But Type 2 answers can also be a source of biases and even errors, so this enigma is not solved. So how can we solve this problem?
- Hume said that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and we agree. Just like other animals, humans are capable of forming expectations and drawing various kinds of inferences in an unreflective way. Inference = the extraction of new information from information already available, whatver the process. Reasoning is the process of pursuing this goal by attending to reasons. Humans cannot spend a minute of their waking life without making inferences, but can go days without engaging in reasoning. All animals perform inferences, even if they may be automatic and unconscious computations. There are three basic properties of all cognitive systems:
Cognition is a means for organisms that can move around to react appropriately to risks and opportunities presented by their environment. Brains are going-to-places-things; brains are for doing things.
Cognition involves going well beyond the information available to the senses. To integrate sensory information and respond appropriately, cognition must draw inferences about the way things are, and what to do.
Inferences may be performed by specialised mechanisms that deal with one task.
Perception performs inferences all the time, but these are typically unconscious. Visual illusions surprise us because we usually take our unconscious inferences as what there really is out there. In perception, inference is always at work. Similarly, with reasoning, the inferences involved in comprehension are done as effortlessly and without any awareness of the process. Comprehension always involves inference even if we are not aware of it. Intuitions contrast with the conclusions of conscious reasoning where we know how and why we arrive at them. Intuitions are judgments that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justify them. Intuition is characterised as knowing without knowing how one knows. When we have an intuition, we experience it as something our mind produced but without having any experience of the process of its production. Intuitions, even if they are not a basic type of mechanism, may well be a distinctive metacognitive category. When intuitions ‘appear’ to us in consciousness, despite having little or no knowledge of the reasons for our intuitions, it is taken for granted that there exist reasons that justify them. Intuitive inferences are inferences, the output of which happens to be experienced as intuitions.
- Does learning rely on specialised inferential mechanisms that may have some instinctual basis? A learning instinct (as suggested by Peter Marler) is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge (such as language for humans). Instinct could be seen as natural expertises, and expertises could be seen as acquired instinct. Face recognition and norm-obeying behaviour are universal features of human social life; meaning that it is plausible that the cognitive mechanisms involved have been in good part shaped by biological evolution. Evolved and expert cognitive skills exploit specific brain areas; much of their operations are fast, quasi-automatic. Mechanisms on the instinct-expertise continuum are called modules; autonomous mechanisms with a history, function, and procedures appropriate to this function. How can these individually dumb modules combine into smarter but limited modules that provide for the kind of superior intelligence that humans ascribe to themselves? The view they favour is that inference is achieved by a coalition of relatively autonomous modules that have evolved in the species and develop in individuals so as to solve problems. The discovery of unconscious inference presented a challenge to the classical view of the mind as unitary and principled. How does unconscious inference proceed? Al-Haytham realised that there is a continuum of cases between conscious and unconscious inference, but people don’t reason using logic unconsciously; all inference involves representations and procedures; representations are material things, (activations of groups of neurons in a brain, ink on paper) and what makes a material thing a representation is its function of providing an organism with information about some state of affairs. Inferential procedures apply to representations; what makes a procedure inferential is that it has the function of making more information available for processing. When scholars have looked at unconscious reasoning, they have assumed it takes the form of conscious reasoning; but this is unfounded dogma. What makes this non-logical unconscious inference possible is the existence in the world of dependable regularities. No regularities, no inference. No inference, no action. A cognitive system can contain the same information twice: in a procedure that directly exploits the information, and in a representation that serves as a premise for other kinds of procedures. You can have a reflex fear of snakes and the knowledge that snakes are dangerous.
- Human minds are articulation of many modules; but if reason is based on intuitive inference, what are the intuitions about? Reason is based on intuitive inference about reasons. Humans represent many things in their thoughts, and they recognise that they are doing so. Representations constitute a special ontological category for which humans have specialised inferential mechanisms. These are representations of representations, or metarepresentations. There are mental representations (beliefs, opinions, intentions, etc) and public representations (spoken or written utterances, pictures, etc). These representations are such because of their meaning or content; so what cognitive mechanisms do we have for drawing inference about representations? Humans are capable of mindreading (Theory of Mind) and we tend to monitor our social environment; we open, maintain, and update mental files on people we know and store information concerning what their mental files contain. Our highly social minds track and anticipate what happens in the phiysical environment and what happens in the minds of others. However, our intuitions about things (numbers) are not the same as our intuitions about their representations (numerals). Our intuitions about representations exploit properties of the representations that need not match properties of the things represented, but they may nevertheless be a source of insight about the things represented themselves. Mindreading informs you, through your intuitions, about what others believe, and therefore about the content of their beliefs too. When the woman in the waiting room looks at her watch and sighs, you guess not only that she believes that the doctor is keeping her waiting but also that the doctor is keeping her waiting. Metarepresentational modules provide information not only about the representations metarepresented but also, indirectly, about the things these representations represent. So while these modules have very specific domains, they may nevertheless have a different and much wider virtual domain corresponding to the things represented. Reasoning is based on a metarepresentational module that provides intuitions not about the world in general but about reasons. Reasons are a kind of representation, and can be about anything or any combination of things in the world. Reasoning can be both specialised in its operations and general in its import.
- Most reasons are post-hoc rationalisations. There is a difference between objective and psychological reasons: an objective reason is a fact that objectively supports some conclusion; these are without causal powers. A psychological reason is a mental representation of an objective reason; these are mental representations so do play a causal role in people’s lives. The main role of reasons is not to motivate or guide us in reaching conclusions but to explain and justify after the fact the conclusions we have reached. In order to believe or decide something, we do not need ot pay any attention to reasons; purely intuitive inference, which generates so many of our beliefs and decisions, operates in a way that is opaque to us. Nisbett and Wilson argue that the way we explain our own behaviour isn’t that different from the way we would explain that of others. We are mistaken in assuming that we have direct introspective knowledge of our mental states and of the processes through which they are produced. It is not that we commonly misidentify our true reasons; we are mistaken in assuming that all our inferences are guided by reasons in the first place. Do implicit reasons (unconscious reasons) actually exist though? No. A fact is an objective reason not for one conclusion but for an unbounded variety of conclusions. The representation of a fact is a psychological reason only if this fact is represented as supporting some specific conclusion. Unconscious inferences are produced by modules that don’t represent their reasons or conclusions in any logical manner. Modules are not guided by unconscious psychological reasons. So the point of reasons isn’t to guide the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions; what are reasons for? Reasons justify and explain our behaviour in the eyes of other people; they are social constructs and are produced primarily for social consumption.
- Retrospective reasons justify decisions already taken and beliefs already held. Prospective reasons are arguments in favour of new decisions and beliefs. There is no dividing line between these two as retrospective and prospective reasons rely on one and the same module that delivers intuitions about reasons. How are reasons inferred? They must ultimately be grounded in intuitive inference, which is made possible by regularities in the world. One of the main claims of this book is that reasoning is not an alternative to intuitive inference; reasoning is a use of intuitive inferences about reasons, unlike the dual process theories of Kahneman and Tversky. What renders some conclusions intuitive is neither their content nor the way in which they are produced, but the kind of confidence we have in these conclusions. Our intuitions don’t just feel right; we feel that we are right in coming up with them. Intuitions are thoughts that you may assert on your own authority without an argument or an appeal to authority. Some of our metarepresentational intuitions are not just about our degree of confidence in our first order intuitions but they are about the reasons for these intuitions. We care about our reasons for our intuitions when they are challenged by others or further experience. It’s not that we had reasons in mind when reaching intuitive conclusions; but we typically construct our reasons after reaching the conclusions. The attribution of reasons, to others or oneself needn’t be more than a superficial affair; we search the environment or memory for some plausible piece of information that could be invoked to explain an intuition and assume that this is the actual reason for one’s intuition. We don’t derive intuitive conclusions from reasons; we infer what our reasons must have been from the conclusions we intuitively arrived at; we construct our reasons as an after-the-fact justification. Is the search for reasons a purely cosmetic affair that tries to dress up our naked biases? No; we want our reasons to justify us in the eyes of others, and because they will be assessed, reasons may be rethought and revised to be better accepted. Giving reasons to justify oneself and reacting to the reasons given by others are a way to establish reputations and coordinate expectations. What these reasons help do is represent our inferences as rational in a different, socially relevant sense of the term where rational means, being based on reasons that can be articulated and assessed.
- What if you don’t have any intuitive inferences about a question? If the conclusion embedded in an argument is not an intuitive conclusion, it is a reasoned or reflective conclusion accepted because of higher-order thinking about it. All reflective conclusions in human thinking are indirect outputs of a mechanism of intuitive inference about reasons. Recognising a syllogism as valid and sound isn’t a sufficient reason to accept its conclusion; only if you have independent reasons to accepts its premises may a sound syllogism give you a reason to accept its conclusion. Reasoning itself involves higher-order intuitions about how lower-order intuitions may support some conclusion. Moreover, the true function of reasoning has been misunderstood. Evolution explains function; when the effects of a heritable trait are more beneficial to the reproductive success, then this trait is likely to propagate over generations. Reason is not a means for individuals to acquire superior knowledge and to make better decisions; Reason evolved as a response to problems encountered in social interaction rather than in solitary thinking. Reason fulfills two main functions; one function helps solve a major problem of coordination by producing justifications. The other function helps solve a major problem of communication by producing arguments. To achieve the degree of fine-grained coordination that their multiple forms of communication require, humans need mutual expectations that have to be constantly updated to remain reliable. Knowing what to expect of others is crucial and is achieved by norms at the sociological level and understanding the mental states of others at the psychological level. By giving reasons to explain and justify yourself, you do several things; you influence the way people read your mind, judge your behaviour, and speak of you. You engage in a conversation where others may accept your justifications, question them, and invoke reasons of their own, from which shared norms actually may emerge. In these interactions about interactions, reasons are central. Because communication is so advantageous to humans, strong pressure must have favoured the development of a suite of mechanisms for assessing whom to believe and what to believe. Reasoning is beneficial to addressees by allowing them to better evaluate possibly valuable information that they would not accept on trust. We construct arguments when we are trying to convince others, and we evaluate the arguments given by others as a means of recognising good ideas and rejecting bad ones. Reasoning involves two capacities, that of producing arguments and that of evaluating them, These two capacities jointly constitute one of the two main functions of reasoning; the argumentative function.
- The experience of surprise corresponds to the sudden mobilisation of cognitive resources to readjust expectations that have just been challenged. If reason is an instrument of individual cognition then it should be biased towards information that violates our expectations; but the confirmation bias doesn’t confirm this view. People find it hard to look for counterevidence but only when what is being challenged is their own opinion. Reasoning works to find reasons for our ideas against ideas we oppose. But if the function of reasoning is to justify one’s actions or to convince others, then it should have a confirmation (or myside) bias. Further, there is an asymmetry between how people produce reasons - they are relatively lax about quality control - and how they evaluate others’ reasons - they are much more demanding. This picture of reason fits with the predictions of the interactionist approach. When people have weak or conflicting intuitions, reason drives them toward the decisions which are easier to justify, which is also a prediction of the interactionist approach to reason. Just as we evaluate others, others evaluate us. It is important for us that others have a good opinion of us, so that they would be more willing to cooperate in the future. Our reasons for acting the way we do shouldn’t use be good reasons; they should be reasons that are easily recognised as good.
- In the right interactive context, reason works. It allows people to change each other’s minds so they end up endorsing better beliefs and making better decisions. When it comes to problem solving, groups outperform individuals all the time. For a wide variety of tasks argumentation allows people to reach better answers. This is because, again and again, we see people changing their minds when confronted with good arguments, people reach better conclusions after debating the issue with their peers.
benlear's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
A great companion book to "Thinking fast and slow." It offers a counter-point to the two-systems of that book, instead saying that there is only one system---a system that is built to generate post-hoc rationalizations of our decisions.
blackoxford's review against another edition
5.0
The First Rule of Rationality: There are No Rules of Rationality
Reason is one of those terms, like time or God, which seems obvious until it’s taken seriously. It then dissipates into a semantic haze with no solid meaning whatsoever. No one can find it outside the language which postulates and defines it. Reason, that is, is a purely linguistic phenomenon. And even within language its content is elusive.
Think about it. Reason cannot be logical deduction because deduction requires premises that are postulated without reference to logic. Reason cannot be induction from empirical data because there is no limit to the amount of opposing data which might be supplied.
Scientific method, however that is conceived, can’t be reason. What is deemed acceptable by scientists, however they are identified historically, is subject to continuously changing criteria of evidence and technique.
Philosophy can’t be reason since it always starts with a presumption of what is important in life. Or for that matter after life. And the choice of what is important for many philosophers seems arbitrary if not downright unreasonable.
Yet despite our inability to define what we mean by reason, we tend to treat it as a kind of species-specific superpower. Isn’t reason what distinguishes us from brute animals? Doesn’t reason allow us to transcend the limitations of physical force in resolving our conflicts? Isn’t it reason which allows us to achieve such heights of achievement as space travel and the internet?
There are good reasons to answer all these questions negatively. And in an admirably self-referential way, this is exactly what the authors do: “Reason, we will argue, is a mechanism for intuitive inferences about one kind of representations, namely, reasons.” Reason is about giving and comparing the worth of reasons, often in a most unreasonable manner.
Reason is an interactive process which cannot be reduced to a method or a formula: “We produce reasons in order to justify our thoughts and actions to others and to produce arguments to convince others to think and act as we suggest. We also use reason to evaluate not so much our own thought as the reasons others produce to justify themselves or to convince us.” Anyone who doubts this proposition has never been married, or certainly not been married for long.
In other words, reason is the way human beings communicate. Reason is uniquely human to the extent that human language is unique. Reason is an inherent element of language not something that is applied to language. Reason is how language is employed - to influence others.
The implications of this insight are profoundly important. Reason is not scientific, or rational, or objective; it is political; it is meant to justify and convince. Those who try to fix the meaning of reason are merely employing reason unreasonably for their own ends.
Reason is the profound strength and the equally profound flaw of language. It is the strength of an immeasurably strong linguistic technology that allows complex communal efforts; and it is the flaw of that technology that we are unable to escape from it. Language becomes an imperative which must be used.
Argument is superior to violence, we say. But only for the winners of the argument. Every political system, which is of course defined in language, has a means of keeping the losers of arguments from violence - the potential for even greater violence. Language’s claim to superiority is therefore fatuous. As the authors say, the purpose of reason is always the same - to justify and convince. And failing that, to compel.
Reason is one of those terms, like time or God, which seems obvious until it’s taken seriously. It then dissipates into a semantic haze with no solid meaning whatsoever. No one can find it outside the language which postulates and defines it. Reason, that is, is a purely linguistic phenomenon. And even within language its content is elusive.
Think about it. Reason cannot be logical deduction because deduction requires premises that are postulated without reference to logic. Reason cannot be induction from empirical data because there is no limit to the amount of opposing data which might be supplied.
Scientific method, however that is conceived, can’t be reason. What is deemed acceptable by scientists, however they are identified historically, is subject to continuously changing criteria of evidence and technique.
Philosophy can’t be reason since it always starts with a presumption of what is important in life. Or for that matter after life. And the choice of what is important for many philosophers seems arbitrary if not downright unreasonable.
Yet despite our inability to define what we mean by reason, we tend to treat it as a kind of species-specific superpower. Isn’t reason what distinguishes us from brute animals? Doesn’t reason allow us to transcend the limitations of physical force in resolving our conflicts? Isn’t it reason which allows us to achieve such heights of achievement as space travel and the internet?
There are good reasons to answer all these questions negatively. And in an admirably self-referential way, this is exactly what the authors do: “Reason, we will argue, is a mechanism for intuitive inferences about one kind of representations, namely, reasons.” Reason is about giving and comparing the worth of reasons, often in a most unreasonable manner.
Reason is an interactive process which cannot be reduced to a method or a formula: “We produce reasons in order to justify our thoughts and actions to others and to produce arguments to convince others to think and act as we suggest. We also use reason to evaluate not so much our own thought as the reasons others produce to justify themselves or to convince us.” Anyone who doubts this proposition has never been married, or certainly not been married for long.
In other words, reason is the way human beings communicate. Reason is uniquely human to the extent that human language is unique. Reason is an inherent element of language not something that is applied to language. Reason is how language is employed - to influence others.
The implications of this insight are profoundly important. Reason is not scientific, or rational, or objective; it is political; it is meant to justify and convince. Those who try to fix the meaning of reason are merely employing reason unreasonably for their own ends.
Reason is the profound strength and the equally profound flaw of language. It is the strength of an immeasurably strong linguistic technology that allows complex communal efforts; and it is the flaw of that technology that we are unable to escape from it. Language becomes an imperative which must be used.
Argument is superior to violence, we say. But only for the winners of the argument. Every political system, which is of course defined in language, has a means of keeping the losers of arguments from violence - the potential for even greater violence. Language’s claim to superiority is therefore fatuous. As the authors say, the purpose of reason is always the same - to justify and convince. And failing that, to compel.
matttrevithick's review against another edition
5.0
Beautiful and persuasive. Disagreeing with the central argument from Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the authors offer a compelling argument for an entirely different approach to reason - it’s uses, functions, evolution, and purpose. Other reviewers are exactly right that it’s a long march to get through the first part of the book where they state their case, but once you see how they’re approaching things, the rest of the book takes off and is completely coherent with what they have established. The last sections are downright enjoyable to read.
And what they’ve established is that the ‘intellectualist’ approach of Kahneman (and pretty much everyone since the beginning of time) to reason, or Reason (solitary, objective, unbiased, etc) doesn’t hold up against the idea that reason should be approached from an ‘interactionist’ perspective, whereby debate, discussion, and the social aspect of argument are critical - because the purpose of reason is to justify oneself and to justify oneself to others.
I will be going over my notes for quite awhile with this book...
And what they’ve established is that the ‘intellectualist’ approach of Kahneman (and pretty much everyone since the beginning of time) to reason, or Reason (solitary, objective, unbiased, etc) doesn’t hold up against the idea that reason should be approached from an ‘interactionist’ perspective, whereby debate, discussion, and the social aspect of argument are critical - because the purpose of reason is to justify oneself and to justify oneself to others.
I will be going over my notes for quite awhile with this book...
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