The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, “The Enigma of Reason,” Harvard Univ. Press, 2017, 334 pp.

I don’t particularly advise reading this book, it is tedious.  I only continued because of the many novel concepts regarding reason; novel concepts at least to me. 

Conventional wisdom presents Reason as what makes us human, the source of our knowledge. However, if Reason is so useful, why didn’t it also evolve in other animals? If Reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense?  In the author’s account of the evolution and workings of reason, they set out to solve this double enigma. Reason is not geared to solitary use to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists―why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe (confirmation or myside bias), why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.

Mercier and Sperber place themselves at odds with conventional intellectualist tradition, alternatively proposing an “interactionist” view in which reasoning is primarily a social, rather than an individual, tool. Here the purpose of reasoning is not particularly inquisitive, but instead justificatory – we provide reasons to other people, and we evaluate the reasons provided by other people. The niche of reasoning is in the highly social world of human cooperative groups, a niche where it is highly advantageous to be able to transfer information and trust between individuals who are not kin. This view puts the flaws of individual reasoning in a new perspective – the bias towards confirmatory inquiry is now a feature, rather than a bug.

The interactionist view predicts that individuals will be biased and lazy in their reasoning about their own beliefs, but the opposite when individuals are faced with arguments produced by others.  We are expected to be skeptical, but not pig-headed. Mercier and Sperber introduce a tantalizing array of evidence to show that this is the case. Not only are individuals far less gullible when evaluating arguments produced by people other than themselves, they are willing to abandon their beliefs when confronted with strong arguments. (I have to add, Unless we are talking about politics or religion, of course).

The author’s interactionist account is an antidote to the dual-process models, models which dominate most reasoning research and which are the inspiration for the title of Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking, Fast and Slow. Mercier and Sperber show that the opposition of intuition (fast) and reason (slow) that defines dual-process accounts is unnecessary. Reason can be viewed as an instance of intuitive inference, rather than a novel mental mechanism that poorly implements deductive logic.

My Notes:

Pg. 1:  With Darwin came the realization that whatever traits humans share as a species are not gifts of the gods but outcomes of biological evolution.  Reason, being such a trait, must have evolved.  (Why not? If something as complex as vision has evolved, why not reason?)

Pg. 7:  Much recent thinking about thinking (for instance Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking, Fast and Slow) revolves around a contrast between intuition and reasoning as if these were two quite different forms of inference.  (The authors, on the contrary, maintain that reasoning is itself a kind of intuitive inference.). 

Pg. 8:  Reason 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.

Why bother to explain and justify oneself?  Humans differ from other animals not only in their hyperdeveloped cognitive capacities but also, and crucially, in how and how much they cooperate.  They cooperate not only with kin but also with strangers; not only in here-and-now ventures but also in the pursuit of long-term goals; not only in a small repertoire of species-typical forms of joint action but also in jointly setting up new forms of cooperation. 

Pg. 34:  The idea that reason is what distinguishes humans from other animals is generally traced back to Aristotle.  Among many other achievements, he is credited with having founded the science of logic.  In so doing, he provided reason with the right partner for a would-be everlasting union—or so it seemed.  But lately the marriage has been tottering.

Pg. 39:  Father Wojciech Giertych, the household theologian of Pope Benedict XVI, explained why women are not suited for the priesthood: ‘Men are more likely to think of God in terms of philosophical definitions and logical syllogisms.’  Not convinced?  The relevance of the whole battery of Aristotelian syllogisms to psychology is, we are tempted to quip, equally mysterious.

Pg. 44:  Most psychologists of reasoning would agree that the most recent theoretical development in the field would name ‘dual process theory’;  the idea that there are two quite distinct basic types of processes involved in inference and more generally in human psychology.  A basic insight of dual process theory is that much of what people do in order to resolve a reasoning task isn’t reasoning at all but some other kind of process, faster than reasoning, more automatic, less conscious, and less rule-governed.  Talk of ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ is becoming almost as common and, we fear, often as vacuous as talk of ‘right brain’ and ‘left brain’ has been for a while. 

Pg. 63:  Comprehension always involves inference, even if, most of the time, we are not aware of it.

Pg. 64:  A simple first-pass way to define intuitions is to say that they are judgments (or decisions, which can also be quite intuitive) that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justify them.  Intuition is often characterized as ‘knowing without knowing how one knows.’  Our conscious train of thought is, to a large extent, a ‘train of intuitions.’  Intuitions play a central role in our personal experience and also in the way we think and talk about the mind in general, our ‘folk psychology.’

Pg. 71:  Face recognition and norm-obeying behavior are universal features of human social life.  It is quite plausible therefore that, in both cases, the cognitive mechanisms involved have been in good part shaped by biological evolution.  On the other hand, natural selection is much too slow to have evolved the specialized competencies involved in recent practices such as surfing or computer programming.  Even more ancient cultural skills such as reading or chess playing are still much too recent for something like a learning instinct to have evolved in order to help with their individual acquisition.

Pg. 109:  Why do you think this?  Why did you do that?  We answer such questions by giving reasons, as if it went without saying that reasons guide our thoughts and actions and hence explain them.  This picture of the role of reasons in explanation and in justification is based, however, on a convenient fiction: most reasons are after-the-fact rationalizations. 

Pg. 117:  Studies have found that people are ten times more likely to lend assistance or respond to help when they are alone than with someone who shows no inclination to assist.  Yet, when asked whether the presence of another person or persons had had an effect on their decision not to help, most were adamant that it had had no influence at all. 

Pg. 142:  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.

Pg. 183:  Human cooperation is exceptional not only by its scale but also by the open-ended variety of the forms it takes.  Other animals may have a few types of cooperative interactions in their behavioral repertoire with little or no place for creative improvisation.  What each cooperator may expect of the others is largely predetermined.  When these expectations are not met by other animals because of the incompetence or the defection of one of the cooperators, cooperation is likely to fail.  Humans, on the other hand, rely less on predefined expectations.  Existing forms of cooperation are deployed with great flexibility and often readjusted on the fly.  New forms are often tested.  This flexibility and creativity of human cooperation can be highly advantageous, but only if massive cognitive resources are invested to secure effective coordination.  Members of a party of warriors, or of a sports team, for instance, readjust or even redefine their tactics and their mutual roles on each occasion.

Pg. 198:  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.

Our brains primarily evolved to process data to preserve us and make us feel comfortable, secure, and pleasant, and only secondarily to find the truth.  We all tend to be uncritical of data that support our beliefs and very critical of unsupportive data (confirmation bias).

Pg. 205:  Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes—Chemistry and Peace—joining Marie Curie in this exclusive club.  Pauling narrowly missed a third in the race to discover the structure of DNA.  Yet, he could be seriously in error in other matters.  He at first advocated heavy daily doses of vitamin C as a prophylactic against colds and other minor ailments.  Later he began to promote vitamin C as a treatment for cancer even after the Mayo Clinic study found no effect whatsoever.  Undoubtedly, even the greatest minds can reason in the most biased way.

Pg. 212:  Below is The standard Peter Cathcart Wason selection task:  In front of you are four cards.  Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other.  Two cards have the letter side up; the two others have the number side up:

Which of these four cards must be turned over to find out whether the following rule is true or false of these four cards: “if there is a vowel on one side of a card, then there is an even number on the other side.

Note: only 15% of individuals, but 85%, when in a group, get this correct.

Solution:  The right selection of cards in this example is that of the card with the vowel E and that of the card with an odd number 7—these are the only two cards that might falsify the rule (if there is an odd number on the other side of the E or a vowel on the other side of the 7).  Most participants, however, fail to select the 7 card.  Many select the card with the even number 2 presumably to see whether it has a vowel on the other side.  But since the rule does not say that it should, this card is irrelevant to deciding whether the rule is true or false.

On the basis of this and other experiments, Wason suggested that participants suffered from a bias that would later be called confirmation bias.  The results do suggest that even intelligent adults do not readily adopt a scientific attitude to a novel problem.

Pg. 233:  How about this one:  Paul is looking at Linda and Linda is looking at John.  Paul is married but John is not.  Is a person who is married looking at a person who is not married?  The three possible answers are ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Cannot be determined.’

Most people answer ‘Cannot be determined.”  Thinking that knowing whether Linda is married or not is necessary to answer the question.  But consider: Linda is either married or not married.  If she is married, then she is looking at John, who is not married, so the answer is ‘Yes.’  If she is not married, then Paul, who is married, is looking at her, so the answer is ‘Yes” again.  So the answer is always ‘Yes.’

Pg. 235:  People are good at evaluating others’ reasons having the ability to reason objectively, rejecting weak arguments and accepting strong ones, but they don’t use these skill on the reasons they themselves produce.

Pg. 247:  There are two major features of the production of reasons: it is biased (myside)—people overwhelmingly find reasons that support their previous beliefs—and it is lazy—people do not carefully scrutinize their own reasons, they have a very low evaluation criteria when it comes to their own reasons.  Combined, these two traits can spell disaster for the lone reasoner. 

Pg. 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 at hand.  This, however, cannot be the whole picture.  Justifications in terms of reasons do indeed involve deference to common wisdom or to experts.  What implicitly justifies this deference, however, is the presumption that the community or the experts are better at producing good reasons. 

Pg. 266:  Skepticism toward group efficiency is not entirely misplaced.  When argumentation is not involved, group performance is disappointing.  By and large, group brainstorming doesn’t work.  Feeling free to present wildest ideas with no critical push-back or debate generates fewer and worse ideas than if the ideas of each individual working in isolation had been gathered. 

Pg. 318:  Commonly accepted beliefs today may be hard to stomach for some, including scientists.  For instance, that we are the descendants of unicellular organisms, the product of billions of years of random mutations, barreling around the sun at over 100,000 kilometers per hour, glued to the ground by the same force that keeps the earth in its orbit, seeing this page thanks to light particles for which time does not exist, our consciousness the product of a three-pound slab of gray matter. 

Pg. 328:  Reason is one module of inference among many.  Inferential modules are specialized: they each have a narrow domain of competence and they use procedures adapted to their narrow domain.  This contrasts with the old and still dominant view that all inference is done by means of the same logic (or the same probability calculus, or logic plus probabilities).

Pg. 330:  Reasons are for social consumption.  Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have built for themselves.  Reason’s bias and laziness aren’t flaws; they are features that help reason fulfill its function.  People are biased to find reasons that support their point of view because this is how they can justify their actions and convince others to share their beliefs. 

Pg. 334:  Group discussion is not always efficient.  When people have their ideas closely aligned to start with, it leads to polarization.  When people start with conflicting ideas and no common goal, it tends to exacerbate differences.  Group discussion is typically beneficial when participants have different ideas and a common goal.  The collective benefits reaped in such cases should be seen as a side effect of a mechanism that serves individual interests.