The Enigma of Reason PDF
Preview The Enigma of Reason
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
Description:The list of books you might like
