Reason Evolved for Argumentation Not Truth
Human reason did not evolve to help individuals discover objective truth. It evolved to help us justify ourselves to others and persuade them a social tool, not an epistemic one.
"Human reason is both biased and lazy. Biased because it overwhelmingly finds justifications and arguments that support the reasoner's point of view, lazy because reason makes little effort to assess the quality of the justifications and arguments it produces." Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's interactionist theory of reason upends the Enlightenment story. The standard account says reason is a superpower that elevates cognition, letting us reach better knowledge in all domains. But if reason were truly a general-purpose truth-finding faculty, why would it have evolved in only one species? Their answer: reason evolved specifically for the social niche humans inhabit. Its two main functions are producing reasons to justify oneself and producing arguments to convince others. This explains why reason is "biased and lazy" when used in solitary thinking that is not the environment it was designed for, any more than lungs were designed to work underwater.
The implications are striking. Solitary reasoning reliably produces motivated thinking, confirmation bias, and overconfidence. But put people in a group where they must argue and evaluate each other's reasons, and reason works remarkably well. Reason is better at evaluating good arguments than at producing them. This means the seeming defects of human rationality our biases, our tendency to rationalize are not bugs. They are features of a system optimized for a different task than the one we assume.
The practical upshot: do not trust your own reasoning in isolation. Subject your ideas to genuine challenge from people who disagree. Reason is a team sport, and playing it solo is playing it wrong.
Takeaway: Reason works best not when you think alone, but when you argue with others who can challenge your justifications it was literally built for that.
See also: The Knowledge Illusion We Know Less Than We Think | Writing Is Thinking Made Visible | Causal Reductionism Misses the Forest for the Trees | Wittgenstein's Ruler Measures the Measurer | The Narrative Fallacy Turns Correlation Into Causation
Linked from
- Aristotle's Categories Still Structure Our Thinking
- Most Logical Fallacies Are Social Moves Not Thinking Errors
- The Knowledge Illusion We Know Less Than We Think
- The Logic of Appropriateness Overrides the Logic of Consequences
- We Think in Groups Not as Individuals
- Wittgenstein's Ruler Measures the Measurer