Introduction: A Double Enigma
1 “The shame, the scandal of human animality, could at least be contained by invoking reason, the faculty that makes humans knowledgeable and wise.”
7 “Intuitions are like mental icebergs: we may only see the tip but we know that, below the surface, there is much more to them, which we don’t see.”
8 “Reason, we argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. These two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related.”
8 “Our skills and our general knowledge owe less to individual experience than to social transmission. In most of our daily undertakings, in family life, in work, in love, or in leisure, we rely extensively on what we have learned from others. These huge, indispensable benefits we get from communication go together with a commensurate vulnerability to misinformation. When we listen to others, what we want is honest information. When we speak to others, it is often in our interest to mislead them, not necessarily through straightforward lies but by at least distorting, omitting, or exaggerating information so as to better influence them in their opinions and in their actions.”
10 “It makes sense […] for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an “abnormal” context. Underwater, you wouldn’t expect a pen—which wasn’t designed to work there—or human lungs—which didn’t evolve to work there either—to function properly. Similarly, take reason out of the interactive context in which it evolved, and nothing guarantees that it will yield adaptive results.”
I SHAKING DOGMA
1 Reason on Trial
21 “Specialists of reasoning do not agree among themselves. Actually, the polemics in which they are engaged are hot enough to have been described as “rationality wars.” This very lack of agreement among specialists who, one hopes, are all good reasoners, is particularly ironic: sophisticated reasoning on reasoning does not come near providing a consensual understanding of reasoning itself.”
2 Psychologists’ Travails
47 – 48 “dual process theory seemed to help resolve what we have called the enigma of reason by explaining why reasoning so often fails to perform its function. True reasoning (type 2 processes), the theory claimed, is indeed “logical,” but it is quite costly in terms of cognitive resources. If people’s judgments are not systematically rational, it is because they are commonly based on cheaper type 1 processes. Type 1 processes are heuristic shortcuts that, in most ordinary circumstances, do lead to the right judgment. In nonstandard situations, however, they produce biased and mistaken answers. All the same, using type 1 processes makes sense: the lack of high reliability is a price rationally paid for day-to-day speed and ease of inference. Moreover, type 2 reasoning remains available to double-check the output of type 1 intuitions. Intellectual alertness—intelligence, if you prefer—goes together with a greater readiness to let type 2 reasoning take over when needed. Enigma resolved? Not really.
The more dual process approaches were being developed, the more they inspired experimental research, the less this simple and happy picture could be maintained. Evans and Stanovich now call it a fallacy to interpret dual process theory as committed to seeing type 2 processes as necessarily “better” than type 1 processes. In fact, they acknowledge, type 2 reasoning can itself be a source of biases and even introduce errors where type 1 intuition had produced a correct judgment. We are not quite back to the early approach of Evans and Wason in the 1970s, if only because the picture is now so much richer, but the problems that dual process approaches seemed to solve are just posed in new and somewhat better terms. The enigma of reason still stands. […]
For decades, the central question of the field had been: What is the mechanism by means of which humans reason? “Mental logic!” argued some psychologists; “mental models!” argued others. Some still see this as the central question and have offered novel answers, drawing on new ideas in logic or in probabilities. But with the dual process approach, doubt has been sown.
First there was the idea that there are not one but two types of processes at work. Then several dual system theorists came to see type 1 processes as carried out by a variety of different specialized mechanisms. More recently, even the homogeneity of type 2 processes has been questioned. The more it is recognized that human inference involves a variety of mechanisms at several levels, the less adequate become the labels “dual process” and “dual system theory.” Reason and logic have split, and reason itself now seems to be broken into pieces. This is both a good end point for one kind of research and a good start for another.” !!
II UNDERSTANDING INFERENCE
49 “The elephant trunk is a type of nose. However impressive it may be, it would not make sense to think of it as the epitome of noses. Similarly, reason is one type of inference mechanism; it is neither the best nor the model of all others.”
3 From Unconscious Inferences to Intuitions
60 FREDERICK BARTLETT “In a world of a constantly changing environment, literal recall is extraordinarily unimportant.”
4 Modularity
72 “The French neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen have established that the recognition of written words in reading recruits a small and precise brain area they named the “visual word form area” that is next to the fusiform face area in the left hemisphere of the brain. This area recognizes letters and words in the script acquired by the individual independently of whether they are in upper- and lowercase, in handwriting or in printing fonts. There is evidence that the same area is involved in blind people reading in Braille with their fingers.”
74 “Today, evidence and arguments from neuroscience, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology has favored a view of the mind as an articulation of a much greater variety of autonomous mechanisms. Identifying and describing these mechanisms have become a central task of cognitive science.
In philosophy of mind and in psychology, however, talk of modules or of modularity is, for historical reasons, controversial.”
5 Cognitive Opportunism
76 “The classical view of inference assumes a powerful logic engine that, whatever the peculiarities of the task at hand, steers the mind on a straight and principled path. The view we favor is that inference, and cognition more generally, are achieved by a coalition of relatively autonomous modules that have evolved in the species and that develop in individuals so as to solve problems and exploit opportunities as they appear. Just as guerrilla warfare or sailing, cognition is opportunistic.” !!!
81 “A representation has the function of providing an organism (or, more generally, any information-processing device) with information about some state of affairs. The information provided may be about actual or about desirable states of affairs, that is, about facts or about goals.”
83 “Several modules may process the same inputs but submit them to different procedures. A main benefit of having a modular system with many modules working mostly in parallel is to simultaneously achieve a plurality of outcomes.”
86 “Animals, including humans, have evolved to take advantage of regularities in their environment. They have not evolved to attend to all regularities or to regularities in general. Attempting to do so would be an absurd waste of time and energy. Rather, animals take into account only regularities that, sometimes directly and more often indirectly, matter to their reproductive success.”
6 Metarepresentations
90 “The classical contrast between intuition and reasoning isn’t better justified than the old hackneyed contrast between animals and humans beings (and its invocation of reason as something humans possess and beasts don’t). […] to contrast reason with intuitive inference in general rather than with other forms of intuitive inference is to deprive oneself of the means to understand how and why humans reason.”
96 “What makes agents rational […] isn’t a general mechanism or disposition to think and act rationally, but a variety of inferential mechanisms with different inferential specializations. These mechanisms, notwithstanding their diversity, have all been shaped by a selective pressure for efficiency”
102 “Our intuitions about things ([e.g.,] numbers) are not the same as our intuitions about their representations ([e.g.,] numerals).
Our intuitions about representations exploit properties of the representations that need not match properties of the things represented (such as roundedness).
Our intuitions about representations of things may nevertheless be a source of insight about the things represented themselves. (For instance, that 900 is three times 300 is a fact about the numbers themselves; this fact is intuitively grasped because of the intuitive relationship between the numerals used in the decimal system to represent these two numbers.)”
III RETHINKING REASON
107 “Reason, we argue, is a mechanism of intuitive inferences about reasons in which logic plays at best a marginal role. Humans use reasons to justify themselves and to convince others, two activities that play an essential role in their cooperation and communication.”
7 How We Use Reasons
109 “reasons are open to evaluation: they may be good or bad. Good reasons justify the thoughts or actions that they explain. This picture of the role of reasons in explanation and in justification may seem self-evident. It is based, however, on a convenient fiction: most reasons are after-the-fact rationalizations. Still, this fictional use of reasons plays a central role in human interactions, from the most trivial to the most dramatic.” !!!
111 “If we talk about objective reasons at all, it is because they are represented both in what people think and in what they say and, unlike facts, representations of facts do have causal powers.”
112 “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.” !!
127 “Reasons are social constructs. They are constructed by distorting and simplifying our understanding of mental states and of their causal role and by injecting into it a strong dose of normativity. Invocations and evaluations of reasons are contributions to a negotiated record of individuals’ ideas, actions, responsibilities, and commitments. This partly consensual, partly contested social record of who thinks what and who did what for which reasons plays a central role in guiding cooperative or antagonistic interactions, in influencing reputations, and in stabilizing social norms. Reasons are primarily for social consumption.” !!!
8 Could Reason Be a Module?
133 “reasoning is not an alternative to intuitive inference; reasoning is a use of intuitive inferences about reasons.”
135-136 “An intuition is a thought that, you feel, you may assert on your own authority, without an argument or an appeal to the authority of a third party. To make an assertion (or propose a course of action) on the basis of your intuition is a social move that puts others in the situation of having either to accept it or to express distrust not just in what you are saying but in your authority for saying it. By expressing an intuition as such, you are raising the stakes: you stand to gain in authority if it is accepted, and to lose if it is not. Even if your assertion is rejected, however, putting it forward as an intuition of yours may help you withstand the authority or arguments of others. Intuition may license stubbornness, which sometimes is a sensible social strategy.” !!
141 “We intuitively infer our reasons for some specific intuition not on the general presumption of our own rationality, but on a much narrower confidence in the specific kind of competence that produced this intuition.” !!
142-143 “Reasons, we have argued, are for social consumption. People think of reasons to explain and justify themselves. In so doing, they accept responsibility for their opinions and actions as justified by them; they implicitly commit themselves to norms that determine what is reasonable and that they expect others to observe. In giving reasons, people take the risk of seeing their reasons challenged. They also claim the right to challenge the reasons of others. Someone’s reputation is, to a large extent, the ongoing effect of a conversation spread out in time and social space about that person’s reasons. In giving our reasons, we try to take part in the conversation about us and to defend our reputation. We influence the reputation of others by the way we evaluate and discuss their reasons. […]
We want our reasons to justify us in the eyes of others. Because they are going to be submitted to others’ judgment, reasons may be rethought and revised to be better accepted. Sometimes this means revising, moreover, the conclusions that our reasons support: changing opinion or course of action so as to better be able to justify ourselves. Reasons and conclusions may, in the end, have to be mutually readjusted.
There is, we are assuming, a dedicated metarepresentational module, the job of which is to infer reasons, ours and those of others. Its job is not to provide a psychologically accurate account of the reasons that motivate people. In fact, the implicit psychology—the presumption that people’s beliefs and actions are motivated by reasons—is empirically wrong. Giving reasons to justify oneself and reacting to the reasons given by others are, first and foremost, a way to establish reputations and coordinate expectations.” !!
9 Reasoning: Intuition and Reflection
158 “Syllogisms are not better arguments for inquisitive or argumentative reasoning. They are an altogether different kind of thing. Syllogisms (and deductions generally) are abstract formal or semiformal structures that make explicit a relationship of logical consequence between premises and conclusion. They may be used for a variety of purposes, but in themselves, they don’t do anything. The arguments used in reasoning, on the other hand, are not defined by their structure, which is quite variable, but by what they do, namely, provide reasoners with reasons to come to some conclusion.” !!!
172 “how rational is it to think that only you and the people who agree with you are rational? Much more plausible is the conclusion that reasoning, however good, however rational, does not reliably secure convergence of ideas.” !!!!
10 Reason: What Is It For?
198-199 “Reasoning involves two capacities, that of producing arguments and that of evaluating them. These two capacities are mutually adapted and must have evolved together. Jointly they constitute, we claim, one of the two main functions of reason and the main function of reasoning: the argumentative function.” !!!
IV WHAT REASON CAN AND CANNOT DO
11 Why Is Reasoning Biased?
218 “In order to test the role of intuition in impression formation, half the participants were stopped from using reason—by having to hold in mind a long string of digits, a task that monopolizes resources necessary for sustained reasoning. These participants, then, were guided by their intuitions. As we would have predicted, these participants paid more attention to the surprising statement. By contrast, participants who could reason paid more attention to the unsurprising statement. Intuitions aimed at gathering the most useful information while reasoning aimed at confirming the participants’ stereotypes.” !!!
218 “Reason rarely questions reasoners’ intuitions, making it very unlikely that it would correct any misguided intuitions they might have.” !!
221 “The myside bias doesn’t turn argumentation into a purely competitive endeavor. Argumentation is a form of communication and is typically pursued cooperatively. At its best, the myside bias becomes a way of dividing cognitive labor.” !!!
12 Quality Control: How We Evaluate Arguments
224-227 “A discussion is interactive: instead of two long, elaborate pleas, people exchange many short arguments. This back-and-forth makes it possible to reach good arguments without having to work so hard. […]
Reason should make the best of the interactive nature of dialogue, refining justifications and arguments with the help of the interlocutors’ feedback.” !!
227 “When a normal interlocutor is not swayed by a reason, she offers counterarguments, pushing the speaker to provide better reasons. An experimenter, by contrast, remains neutral. She may prompt the participant for more arguments, but she doesn’t argue back. If reason evolved to function in an interactive back-and-forth, strong arguments should be expected only when they are called for by an equally strong pushback.”
13 The Dark Side of Reason
243 JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES “starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.” !!
244 “When you agree with someone, you don’t scrutinize her arguments very carefully—after all, you already accept her conclusion, so why bother? When like-minded people argue, all they do is provide each other with new reasons supporting already held beliefs. Just like solitary reasoners, groups of like-minded people can be victims of belief polarization, overconfidence, and belief perseverance.” !!
246 “Not only does a feel-good explanation fail to fit the facts, it doesn’t make evolutionary sense, either. It confuses the proximal and the ultimate levels of explanation. […]
An individual who would find drinking painful but would enjoy feeling his hand roast or who would resent the affection of friends and revel in their loathing would not be well equipped to survive and reproduce. So whether or not reasoning helps people feel good, it cannot have evolved to this end.” !!!
14 A Reason for Everything
259 “Reason improves our social standing rather than leading us to intrinsically better decisions. And even when it leads us to better decisions, it’s mostly because we happen to be in a community that favors the right type of decisions on the issue.” !!!
V REASON IN THE WILD
16 Is Human Reason Universal?
297-298 “If learning to reason is, to a large extent, learning to anticipate counterarguments, then the best solution might be to expose people to more counterarguments—to make people argue more. […]
Arguing, it seems, makes one a better reasoner across the board. By being confronted with counterarguments on a specific topic, one learns to anticipate their presence in other contexts.” !!
17 Reasoning about Moral and Political Topics
309-310 “When a sample of citizens is brought together, divided in small groups, and, with the soft prodding of a moderator, made to discuss policy, good things happen. The participants in these discussions end up better informed, with more articulate positions but also a deeper understanding of other people’s point of view. Their opinions tend to converge toward a reasonable compromise. They are more likely to participate in public life in the future.” !!
Conclusion: In Praise of Reason after All
330 “We are as good at recognizing biases in others as we are bad at acknowledging our own. Perhaps this explains why many people can both hold onto an intellectualist position (for themselves and some kindred spirits) and firmly believe that reason is biased and lazy (particularly in individuals who disagree with them).” !!