Four important propositions. First, reasoning starts as a way of getting support from the group for whatever it is one wants to do, then moving on to be a way for getting the group to reach decisions. Second, reasoning is very subject to myside bias, that is to say ‘it overwhelmingly finds justifications and arguments that support the reasoner’s [initial, intuitive] point of view’. Third, reasoning is lazy. Reasoners inch their way forward, gradually deploying more and more reasons as they attempt to defeat the emerging counter-reasons. Rather than attempting to stake all on a single salvo. Furthermore ‘reason makes little effort to assess the quality of the justifications and arguments it produces’ and is content to leave that to others. All of which might help rather than hinder consensus building. Fourth, reasoning has nothing much to do with logic, despite some superficial similarities.
Lots of entertaining anecdotes about systematic quirks and biases in reasoning. For example, if you set people a brain teaser involving an unknown tennis player, they mostly get it right. But if you substitute a famous tennis player for the unknown tennis player, they mostly get what is essentially the same brain teaser, wrong.
Some of these anecdotes involved something called the Wason selection task, widely used by investigators in this area. See reference 4.
Quite a lot of space is given to inference and prediction, of which animal brains do a good deal, mostly very successfully, but I did not learn how this related to reason. I did learn that there are some desert ants who have learned to navigate by using the way that the polarity of light varies across the sky, of interest as I had not even known that it did vary, never mind that one could make use of that variation.
Some space given to a tri-partite division into perception which is stimulus bound, intuition which is fast & unconscious and reasoning which is slow & conscious. Intuition clearly being useful in contexts when a fast response is indicated. But often being wrong and the idea is that reason can provide some correction.
A lot of space is given to the ups and downs of reasoning in groups. But the closing message is optimistic; reasoning, if conducted in the right way and in the right spirit, can mitigate myside bias, can deliver the goods and can usually avoid the sort of crowd madness entertainingly documented at reference 7.
Some hints about the large amount of money that big organisations spend on trying to improve their reasoning, decision making processes. Either from the top down, looking at the way that top management do their stuff, or from the bottom up, trying to educate the troops about how to make better decisions. About how, for example, to correct their myside biases. A happy hunting ground for the management consultants last mentioned at reference 10. See also, for example, references 5 and 6.
Logic, as invented by the ancient Greeks, and brought to a high pitch in the twentieth century by the likes of Kurt Gödel, is not of much use in everyday reasoning. Partly because of its sharp dichotomy between true and false, with few simple statements about the world being wholly true or wholly false. So, for example, while there is some truth in the statement that carnivores eat meat, it is certainly not true that all members of the carnivore family of animals eat just meat – indeed, some do not eat meat at all, except, perhaps, by accident.
The ability to reason is neither innate nor universal. For example, Alexander Luria – an eminent Russian neuropsychologist whom I come across from time to time – went to central Asia in the 1930’s and found that unredeemed, uneducated Uzbeks were not capable of elementary abstract reasoning about the colour of polar bears. But once they had been to school for a bit, they were.
The quality of reasoning can be affected by conditions. By, for example, the reasoners being ill, tired or otherwise uncomfortable. Some Israeli investigators found, for example, that magistrates were systematically harsher in their judgements when they were tired.
Life is so complicated and there is so much knowledge around these days that no one person can reasonably expect to be able to reason sensibly or helpfully about everything of public interest. Whether to build a nuclear reactor on the Isle of Wight, whether to erect a big tent on the Greenwich Peninsular, the right way to teach children to read or the right way to catch and punish criminals. We have to be able to rely on others, to trust others. Unfortunately, in most of these matters, diplomas or brass plates on the door, like those of doctors and dentists, are not usually good enough.
Nor are big brains sufficient protection against bad reasoning. To give just three example: the eminent chemist, Linus Pauling, had some bad ideas about Vitamin C and cancer. The eminent statistician, R.A. Fisher, had some bad ideas about smoking and cancer – with Fisher himself being a pipe smoker. And the eminent French criminologist, A. Bertillon, who, inter alia, invented the mug shot, had some bad ideas about the Dreyfus bordereau. Bad ideas with which all three persisted with in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. And then there was the talented mathematician turned bomber, Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. The men of the church mentioned at the beginning of reference 2, clearly had a point when they distrusted the workings of pure reason – although they were far from having a satisfactory answer themselves. And youthful ambitions notwithstanding, I have no idea whether Kant of reference 8 had one either, the hopeful sounding title notwithstanding. Mercier & Sperber spend few words on him, seeming to prefer reference 9, so perhaps not.
I close with a new to me acronym, WEIRD, for people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Usually used when having a pop at a psychological study for not having included any other people.
Conclusions
A useful and easy going canter through everyday reasons and reasoning and the case for the four propositions listed above is well made. Reasoning is indeed interactionist rather than individualistic and collective reasoning usually gives a better result than individual reasoning.
But the description of the evolutionary and developmental processes involved here are less convincing, as is the case for the brain being modularised for these purposes.
Which is more or less the view of the various reviews which this book has attracted, at least those which I have seen. See, for example, reference 3.
Next stop, reference 9.
References
Reference 1: The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding – Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber – 2017.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-special-sort-of-hand-eye-coordination.html.
Reference 3: The enduring enigma of reason – Catarina Dutilh Novaes – 2018. ‘... As suggested above, I wholeheartedly agree with the gist of M&S’s interactionist account of reason, as opposed to classical, individualistic accounts ... reasons are primarily produced for social consumption (self-consumption being the limit case rather than the norm). Throughout the book, they show that the interactionist account is able to make sense of a number of features of reason that remain poorly explained or outright mysterious in classical, individualistic accounts...’.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task.
Reference 5: http://www.tgggroup.com/.
Reference 6: https://heterodoxacademy.org/.
Reference 7: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds – Charles Mackay – 1841.
Reference 8: Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) – Immanuel Kant – 1781. I think my own copy was retired, unread, some years ago.
Reference 9: The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment – Haidt J – 2001. With catchy subtitles like ‘Philosophy and the worship of reason’.
Reference 10: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/city-boys-episode-2.html.
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