The Enigma of Reason

405 Pages·2017·44.4 MB·English

by  Hugo Mercier

The Enigma of Reason

The Enigma of Reason
.
Hugo Mercier Dan Sperber
harvard university press
.
Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Mercier, Hugo, author. | Sperber, Dan, author.
Title: The enigma of reason / Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050637 | ISBN 9780674368309 (cloth ; alk. paper : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Reason. | Reason— Social aspects.
Classification: LCC B833 .M47 2017 | DDC 128 / .33— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016050637
Jacket art: Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1957. Ink on paper.
Originally published in The New Yorker, June 1, 1957.
© The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York.
Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why
Contents
Introduction: A Double Enigma 1
I Shaking Dogma 13
1 Reason on Trial 15
2 Psychologists’ Travails 34
II understanding inference 49
3 From Unconscious Inferences to Intuitions 51
4 Modularity 68
5 Cognitive Opportunism 76
6 Metarepre sen ta tions 90
I II rethinking reason 107
7 How We Use Reasons 109
8 Could Reason Be a Module? 128
9 Reasoning: Intuition and Reflection 148
10 Reason: What Is It For? 175
IV what reason can and cannot do 203
11 Why Is Reasoning Biased? 205
12 Quality Control: How We Evaluate Arguments 222
13 The Dark Side of Reason 237
vi Contents
14 A Reason for Every thing 251
15 The Bright Side of Reason 262
V reason in the wild 275
16 Is Human Reason Universal? 277
17 Reasoning about Moral and Po liti cal Topics 299
18 Solitary Geniuses? 315
Conclusion: In Praise of Reason after All 328
Notes 337
References 357
Acknowl edgments 383
Illustration Credits 385
Index 387
The Enigma of Reason

Introduction: A Double Enigma
They drink and piss, eat and shit. They sleep and snore. They sweat and
shiver. They lust. They mate. Their births and deaths are messy affairs. Ani-
mals, humans are animals! Ah, but humans, and humans alone, are endowed
with reason. Reason sets them apart, high above other creatures—or so
Western phi los o phers have claimed.
The shame, the scandal of human animality, could at least be contained by
invoking reason, the faculty that makes h umans knowledgeable and wise.
Reason rather than language—o ther animals seemed to have some form of
language too. Reason rather than the soul— too mysterious. Endowed with
reason, humans were still animals, but not beasts.
Reason: A Flawed Superpower?
With Darwin came the realization that whate ver traits humans share as a spe-
cies are not gifts of the gods but outcomes of biological evolution. Reason,
being such a trait, must have evolved. And why not? Hasn’t natu ral se lection
produced many wondrous mechanisms?
Take vision, for instance. Most animal species benefit from this amazing
biological adaptation. Vision links dedicated external organs, the eyes, to
specialized parts of the brain and manages to extract from patterns of reti nal
stimulation exquisitely precise information about the properties, location,
and movement of distant objects. This is a hugely complex task—m uch more
complex, by any account, than that of reason. Researchers in artificial intel-
ligence have worked hard on modeling and implementing both vision and