Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence (...) in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found. (shrink)

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. 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 their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, (...) 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. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. 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, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.--. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

Much evidence has accumulated in favor of such a dual view of reasoning. There is however some vagueness in the way the two systems are characterized. Instead of a principled distinction, we are presented with a bundle of contrasting features - slow/fast, automatic/controlled, explicit/implicit, associationist/rule based, modular/central - that, depending on the specific dual process theory, are attributed more or less exclusively to one of the two systems. As Evans states in a recent review, “it would then be helpful to (...) have some clear basis for this distinction”; he also suggests that “we might be better off talking about type 1 and type 2 processes” rather than systems. We share the intuitions that drove the development of dual system theories. Our goal here is to propose in the same spirit a principled distinction between two types of inferences: ‘intuitive inference’ and ‘reflective inference’. We ground this distinction in a massively modular view of the human mind where metarepresentational modules play an important role in explaining the peculiarities of human psychological evolution. We defend the hypothesis that the main function of reflective inference is to produce and evaluate arguments occurring in interpersonal communication. This function, we claim, helps explain important aspects of reasoning. We review some of the existing evidence and argue that it gives support to this approach. (shrink)

Having defended the usefulness of our definition of reasoning, we stress that reasoning is not only for convincing but also for evaluating arguments, and that as such it has an epistemic function. We defend the evidence supporting the theory against several challenges: People are good informal arguers, they reason better in groups, and they have a confirmation bias. Finally, we consider possible extensions, first in terms of process-level theories of reasoning, and second in the effects of reasoning outside the lab.

Much evidence has accumulated in favor of such a dual view of reasoning. There is however some vagueness in the way the two systems are characterized. Instead of a principled distinction, we are presented with a bundle of contrasting features - slow/fast, automatic/controlled, explicit/implicit, associationist/rule based, modular/central - that, depending on the specific dual process theory, are attributed more or less exclusively to one of the two systems. As Evans states in a recent review, “it would then be helpful to (...) have some clear basis for this distinction”; he also suggests that “we might be better off talking about type 1 and type 2 processes” rather than systems. We share the intuitions that drove the development of dual system theories. Our goal here is to propose in the same spirit a principled distinction between two types of inferences: ‘intuitive inference’ and ‘reflective inference’. We ground this distinction in a massively modular view of the human mind where metarepresentational modules play an important role in explaining the peculiarities of human psychological evolution. We defend the hypothesis that the main function of reflective inference is to produce and evaluate arguments occurring in interpersonal communication. This function, we claim, helps explain important aspects of reasoning. We review some of the existing evidence and argue that it gives support to this approach. (shrink)

In their reviews, Chater and Oaksford, Dutilh Novaes, and Sterelny are critical of our modularist approach to reason. In this response, we clarify our claim that reason is one of many cognitive modules that produce intuitive inferences each in its domain; the reason module producing intuitions about reasons. We argue that in‐principle objections to the idea of massive modularity based on Fodor's peculiar approach are not effective against other interpretations that have led to insightful uses of the notion in psychology (...) and biology. We explain how the reason module evaluates reasons on the basis of their metacognitive properties. We show how the module fulfils a social function, that of producing reasons to justify oneself and convince others and of evaluating the reasons others produce to convince us. (shrink)

The Pigeonhole Principle states that if n items are sorted into m categories and if n > m, then at least one category must contain more than one item. For instance, if 22 pigeons are put into 17 pigeonholes, at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one pigeon. This principle seems intuitive, yet when told about a city with 220,000 inhabitants none of whom has more than 170,000 hairs on their head, many people think that it is merely likely (...) that two inhabitants have the exact same number of hair. This failure to apply the Pigeonhole Principle might be due to the large numbers used, or to the cardinal rather than nominal presentation of these numbers. We show that performance improved both when the numbers are presented nominally, and when they are small, albeit less so. We discuss potential interpretations of these results in terms of intuition and reasoning. (shrink)

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established (...) publically, perhaps it acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es describir la situación actual y las proyecciones de la comparación forense de la voz en Chile, a la luz de los estándares internacionales que se enfocan en la producción de evidencia confiable, que pueda ser utilizada en los tribunales de justicia. Para ello, en principio, se dan a conocer los fundamentos científicos que caracterizan esta rama de las ciencias forenses y, luego, sobre esa base se analiza y comenta la situación de Chile y (...) sus proyecciones, tanto en la práctica como en la investigación forense. Abstract: The objective of this work is to describe the current situation and the projections of forensic voice comparison in Chile, in the light of international standards that focus on the production of reliable evidence that can be used in the courts of justice. To do this, first, the scientific foundations that characterize this branch of forensic sciences are disclosed and, then, on that basis, the situation in Chile and its projections are analyzed and discussed, both in practice and in the forensic research. (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende aportar información concisa y útil acerca de un género cinematográfico sumamente apreciado por la crítica: el cine no narrativo. Para ello, en una primera parte se resaltan los fundamentos teóricos, sobre todo antropológicos, que dan a las películas no narrativas su carácter central, tanto estructural como elocutivo, como reflejo de un arte que reproduce el origen de los mitos; en una segunda parte se ofrecen ejemplos concretos de su funcionamiento con base en esos fundamentos y se (...) infieren los modos en que esas películas son recibidas por la audiencia; finalmente, se concluye cuál ha sido la influencia e importancia de este tipo de cine a lo largo de la historia y se explora el posible futuro de este tipo de cine. El método empleado es inductivo y cualitativo, por lo que la interpretación personal tiene primacía en este trabajo. (shrink)

El objetivo del artículo consiste en poner en diálogo tres líneas de investigación dentro de la epistemología contemporánea: la Epistemología de la Virtud, el paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada y la Teoría Argumentativa de la Razón. Frente al problema que interesa analizar aquí, a saber, la búsqueda de un marco teórico que permita diseñar estrategias pedagógicas (tanto al interior de la enseñanza de la filosofía como fuera de ella) sobre premisas realistas, la Epistemología de la Virtud será presentada como una (...) corriente marcadamente optimista desde el punto de vista epistémico. El paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada representará la contrapartida de dicha corriente, en la medida en que parece conducir a un pesimismo marcado respecto de la posibilidad de diseñar estrategias que permitan perfeccionar las prácticas epistémicas de los sujetos. Frente a estos dos polos, se sugerirá que la Teoría Argumentativa de la Razón (desarrollada en la última década por Hugo Mercier y Dan Sperber) representa una alternativa prometedora por dos razones fundamentales: en primer lugar, porque ofrece una respuesta al problema (enfrentado por el paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada) del carácter adaptativo de la razón humana desde un punto de vista evolutivo; en segundo lugar, porque permite superar el pesimismo epistémico esencial al paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada al momento de planificar estrategias pedagógicas realistas y efectivas. (shrink)

Contiene tres trabajos sobre Arturo Ardao: sobre la noción de sujeto (Yamandú Acosta); sobre la interpretación de Andrés Bello (Arturo A. Roig); y sobre su libro Filosofía de lengua española (ver HLAS 36:5047). Mencionamos algunas de las otras contribuciones: el tema de la historia de la filosofía latinoamericana (Horacio Cerutti Guldberg); el batllismo (Manuel A. Claps); el tema de Calibán (Roberto Fernández Retamar); el pensamiento de Pedro Figari (Juan Fló); la universidad latinoamericana en el siglo XVIII (Gregorio Weinberg); (...) el pensamiento socialista en el Uruguay (Carlos Zubillaga). Es de lamentar que no se agregara al volumen una bibliografía de Ardao"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58. (shrink)

Over the last decade, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have elaborated an influential naturalistic account of human reasoning. Their distinctive hypothesis is that its adaptive rationale – and primary function – is to produce and assess reasons in interpersonal justification and argumentation. In this paper I argue, first, that their characterisation of reasoning as based on metarepresentations threatens to oversophisticate reasoning and faces the problem of vicious regress. Second, I argue that they owe us a coherent account (...) of the cognitive role of reasons in reasoning. (shrink)

Summer School in Cognitive Science: Minds and Societies. Communication par affiche dans un congrès, Montréal, 26 juin - 06 juillet 2008.

This paper aims to accessibly present, and then critique, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's recent proposals for the evolutionary function of human reasoning. I take a critical look at the main source of experimental evidence that they claim as support for their view, namely the confirmation or “myside” bias in reasoning. I object that Mercier and Sperber did not adequately argue for a claim that their case rests on, namely that it is evolutionarily advantageous for (...) you to get other people to believe whatever you antecedently believe. And I give my own argument that this claim is false. I also critically look at their suggestion that reasoning has a justificatory function, functioning as a kind of reputation management tool. I argue this suggestion does not amount to a plausible evolutionary function. (shrink)