The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding
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Last annotated on June 1, 2017
reason seems to have an obvious function: to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions on their own.Read more at location 2962
but the upshot of experimental research on how we reason is that we do so in a way that is biased and lazy and that often fails to solve even simple but unfamiliar problems. It would be easy to stop here and simply conclude, as many psychologists have done, that human reason is just poorly designed.Read more at location 2966
In Chapters 7, 8, and 9, we have argued that reasons are commonly used in the pursuit of social interaction goals, in particular to justify oneself and to convince others.Read more at location 2969
Before Darwin, attributing a function to some trait of an animal or a plant involved little more than answering the question: What is it good for?Read more at location 2987
It was Darwin’s theory of natural selection that provided the basis for a coherent and useful notion of a functionRead more at location 2994
Any inheritable trait of an organism has many effects. Most of these effects are without consequences for reproductive success. The scent of a flower, for instance, might make some local animals dizzy without this harming or benefiting the plant in any way. Some effects of a trait may happen to enhance reproductive success: the scent of a flower may attract insects and recruit them as pollinators. Still other effects of a trait may actually compromise reproductive success: a scent might attract florivores and entice them to eat the flower,Read more at location 2996
When overall the effects of a heritable trait are more beneficial than harmful to the reproductive success of its carriers, then this trait is likely to be selected and to propagate over generations.Read more at location 3001
The Function of Reason from Aristotle to Twentieth-Century PsychologistsRead more at location 3012
Reason is a means for individuals to acquire superior knowledge and to make better decisions. Reason, by performing this intellectual function, elevates humans above all other animals.Read more at location 3016
The functional effects of reason are roughly the same for Darwin as they were for Aristotle. What is new with Darwin, however, is the use of these effects to explain why reason should have evolved. And because Darwin is making a more precise claim about the function of reason, his claim is more open to a scientific challenge. If reason evolved to help individuals think on their own, then it should really provide for truly better thinking in terms of both cognitive benefits and mental costs, and if it does not, as much of modern psychology of reasoning suggests is the case, then we are indeed faced with a serious problem. Psychologists who discovered what looked to them like major flaws of human reason must have, you would think, understood and discussed the challenge this presented for a post-Darwinian understanding of the function of reason.Read more at location 3025
If anything, psychologists saw flaws in reasoning as evidence against an evolutionary approach.Read more at location 3034
“The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason?”Read more at location 3046
From an evolutionary point of view, she argued, one should expect reasoning mechanisms to have evolved as responses to specific problems that had been recurrent in the ancestral environment. Specialized adaptations do a much better job of addressing the problems they evolved to handle than would any general problem-solving ability. In fact, it is not even clear what an ability to solve problems in general might consist of (if not, precisely, of a complex articulation of a great many more specialized mechanisms). A general reasoning ability, if such a thing could evolve at all, might, at best, help in dealing with the residue of problems not properly handled by specialized mechanisms.Read more at location 3048
among the many cognitive adaptations most likely to have evolved, there had to be an inferential mechanism aimed at solving a major problem raised by cooperation. Cooperation is an interaction between two or more individuals where each incurs a cost and receives a benefit. Each member of a party of big game hunters, for instance, spends time and takes risks to help the group catch a prey. Provided that the benefits are greater than the costs and are shared fairly, cooperation is advantageous to all cooperators. However, in many cases, each cooperator stands to gain even more by sharing in the benefits of cooperation without paying the full cost, in other terms by cheating or free riding. Hunters who avoid taking risks but take the same share of the meat as others are at an advantage. Of course, if none of the hunters take risks, the prey will escape. Widespread free riding is likely to result in failure of cooperation.Read more at location 3055
an evolved ability to detect cheatersRead more at location 3067
Like Cosmides and Tooby, we expect an evolved mind to consist principally in an articulation of modular mechanisms. Modules are specialized—eachRead more at location 3069
Classical reasoning is not a specialist but a generalist, not a narrow module but a broad faculty.Read more at location 3073
contrary to a long-held dogma of philosophy and psychology, there is no such thing as reasoning in general.Read more at location 3076
Reasoning, we have argued, is produced by a metarepresentational module, the specific domain of which is the relationship between reasons and the conclusions they support. These reasons and conclusions, however, can themselves be about any topics.Read more at location 3084
we agree that natural selection has shaped how humans draw all kinds of inferences and has produced a wide variety of specialized inferential modules. One of these, we add, is a reason module. The justifications and the arguments that the reason module produces may have, embedded in them, conclusions relevant to all domains of knowledge and action. This virtual domain-generality does not, however, make reason, and the organization of human mind generally, any less modular.Read more at location 3087
We have rejected the intellectualist view that reason evolved to help individuals draw better inferences, acquire greater knowledge, and make better decisions. We favor an interactionist approach to reason. Reason, we will argue, evolved as a response to problems encountered in social interaction rather than in solitary thinking.Read more at location 3091
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.Read more at location 3094
