This book posits that the human faculty of reasoning is an evolved trait favored by natural selection. However, it is not a faculty that developed to help an individual human think better on his own, but came about as a faculty developed to interact better with other human beings. “Reason…. has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others.” Reason is not the same as logic. In fact, in academic experiments, humans systematically fail to accomplish rudimentary logic puzzles. The authors also argue that reason, far from being a different “system” from intuition (System II vs. System I thinking), is rather just another type of inference. “Automatic inference in perception and deliberate inference in reasoning are at two ends of a continuum.” Mercier and Sperber suggest that reason developed and evolved as a particular module within the human brains many capabilities. “All these mechanisms on the instinct-expertise continuum are what in biology (or in engineering) might typically be called modules: they are autonomous mechanisms with a history, a function, and procedures appropriate to this function…. There are deep reasons why organisms are, to a large extent, modular systems, that is, articulations of relatively autonomous mechanisms that may have distinct evolutionary and developmental trajectories. Individual modules are relatively rigid, but the articulation of different modules provides complex organisms with adaptive flexibility.” Reasoning developed as an evolutionary trait. “The main role of reasons is not to motivate or guide us in reaching conclusions but to explain and justify after the fact the conclusions we have reached.” Reasons are for social consumption. “Indirect reputational effects may turn out to be no less important than the direct goal of…. action, whatever it is. Socially competent people are hardly ever indifferent to the way their behavior might be interpreted…. When we give reasons for our actions, we not only justify ourselves, we also commit ourselves…. For our audience, this commitment to accepting responsibility and to being guided in the future by the type of reasons we invoked to explain the past is much more relevant than the accuracy of our would-be introspections…. Reasons are social constructs…. 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.” It is this social interaction that has created the need for humans to develop the facility to reason. “Reasoning systematically works to find reasons for our ideas and against ideas we oppose. It always takes our side…. Reason rarely questions reasoners’ intuitions, making it very unlikely that it would correct any misguided intuitions they might have.” If, as Mercier and Sperber suggest, reason evolved not to help the individual work through problems in isolation, but as a social tool, it makes sense that its features are adapted for communal settings. “Reason should make the best of the interactive nature of dialogue, refining justifications and arguments with the help of the interlocutors’ feedback…. If reason evolved to function in an interactive back-and-forth, strong arguments should be expected only when they are called for by an equally strong pushback.” It would not be energy efficient to devote time and brain power to developing cogent arguments except in instances in which they are required to defend oneself. “We are as good at recognizing biases in others as we are bad at acknowledging our own…. It is an undisputed fact that individual reasoning is rarely if ever objective and impartial…. 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…. Instead of laboring hard to anticipate counterarguments, it is generally more efficient to wait for your interlocutors to provide them.” Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense to devote energy not to refining our own reasons, but to accurately judge the reasons of other humans in our orbit. “Reasoning is not only a tool for producing arguments to convince others; it is also, and no less importantly, a tool for evaluating the arguments others produce to convince us. The capacity to produce arguments could evolve only in tandem with the capacity to evaluate them…. In the production of arguments, we should be biased and lazy; in the evaluation of arguments, we should be demanding and objective.” The “defects” of human reasoning can be shown in a new light when looking at the faculty from an evolutionary perspective. Suddenly many bugs become features. By viewing reasoning as a mechanism to justify and argue for intuitions already developed, the picture becomes clearer. It is a retrospective mechanism, not designed to help one navigate the future. It is a social mechanism, not designed to help the individual mind navigate the world, but designed, through dialogue and argumentation, to yield the best and least costly results. Mercier and Sperber might not have solved the enigma of reason, but they certainly put forth a cogent thesis of how reason might have evolved as it actually behaves in the real world and in an evolutionarily beneficial manner for the individual as embedded within a larger social milieu.
No comments:
Post a Comment