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Reasonable
Nov. 6th, 2020 07:20 pmBook Review: The Enigma of Reason - A New Theory of Human Understanding, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
I picked this up in a work book sale a couple of years ago, and it lay on the shelf in a slightly intimidating way. Actually it turned out to be quite readable, though I may have drifted away in a couple of sections. The authors discuss our human inferencing system, of which reasoning forms a part, uniquely from other animals (or so it is claimed). But what is reason and how did we come by it?
Unfortunately our language is overloaded with meaning, so "reason" and "argument" in this book tend to have more intellectual than quotidian meanings. The authors introduce a discussion about logic, and show various logical processes and fallacies, and consider how humans deal with them - rather poorly, it often turns out, frequently making logical errors and offering dubious justifications. Perhaps, being unique to humans, reason is a recent evolutionary development, and hasn't reached an optimum level. Or, as the authors argue, reason is error-prone and lazy but readily corrected and efficient. Their hypothesis is that reason has developed to deal with social and communicative problems between untrusted individuals. This, they argue, explains why we perform only minimal assessment of our own reasons (laziness giving rise to bias), but judge more rigorously the stated reasons of others. There is some interesting discussion on how and why groups generally perform better on reasoning tasks than individuals, and on the systematic effects of psychology research due to experiments most often being performed with western undergraduate students as subjects. I'm only in a lay-position to judge between their "interactionist" theory and what they describe as the standard "intellectualist" theory - in which the purpose of reason is internal to oneself - but their case seems to make sense and correlates with various aspects of human behaviour.
I picked this up in a work book sale a couple of years ago, and it lay on the shelf in a slightly intimidating way. Actually it turned out to be quite readable, though I may have drifted away in a couple of sections. The authors discuss our human inferencing system, of which reasoning forms a part, uniquely from other animals (or so it is claimed). But what is reason and how did we come by it?
Unfortunately our language is overloaded with meaning, so "reason" and "argument" in this book tend to have more intellectual than quotidian meanings. The authors introduce a discussion about logic, and show various logical processes and fallacies, and consider how humans deal with them - rather poorly, it often turns out, frequently making logical errors and offering dubious justifications. Perhaps, being unique to humans, reason is a recent evolutionary development, and hasn't reached an optimum level. Or, as the authors argue, reason is error-prone and lazy but readily corrected and efficient. Their hypothesis is that reason has developed to deal with social and communicative problems between untrusted individuals. This, they argue, explains why we perform only minimal assessment of our own reasons (laziness giving rise to bias), but judge more rigorously the stated reasons of others. There is some interesting discussion on how and why groups generally perform better on reasoning tasks than individuals, and on the systematic effects of psychology research due to experiments most often being performed with western undergraduate students as subjects. I'm only in a lay-position to judge between their "interactionist" theory and what they describe as the standard "intellectualist" theory - in which the purpose of reason is internal to oneself - but their case seems to make sense and correlates with various aspects of human behaviour.