Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: some background
- 2 Folk-psychological commitments
- 3 Modularity and nativism
- 4 Mind-reading
- 5 Reasoning and irrationality
- 6 Content for psychology
- 7 Content naturalised
- 8 Forms of representation
- 9 Consciousness: the final frontier?
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
5 - Reasoning and irrationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: some background
- 2 Folk-psychological commitments
- 3 Modularity and nativism
- 4 Mind-reading
- 5 Reasoning and irrationality
- 6 Content for psychology
- 7 Content naturalised
- 8 Forms of representation
- 9 Consciousness: the final frontier?
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
In this chapter we consider the challenge presented to common-sense belief by psychological evidence of widespread human irrationality, which also conflicts with the arguments of certain philosophers that widespread irrationality is impossible. We argue that the philosophical constraints on irrationality, such as they are, are weak. But we also insist that the standards of rationality, against which human performance is to be measured, should be suitably relativised to human cognitive powers and abilities.
Introduction: the fragmentation of rationality
According to Aristotle, what distinguishes humankind is that we are rational. Yet psychologists have bad news for us: we are not so rational after all. They have found that subjects perform surprisingly poorly at some fairly simple reasoning tests – the best known of which is the Wason Selection Task (Wason, 1968 – see section 2 below). After repeated experiments it can be predicted with confidence that in certain situations a majority of people will make irrational choices. Results of this kind have prompted some psychologists to comment on the ‘bleak implications for human rationality’ (Nisbett and Borgida, 1975; see also Kahneman and Tversky, 1972). Philosophers sometimes tell a completely different story, according to which we are committed to assuming that people are rational, perhaps even perfectly rational. There has, until recently, been almost a disciplinary divide in attitudes about rationality, with psychologists seemingly involved in a campaign of promoting pessimism about human reason, while philosophers have been trying to give grounds for what may sound like rosy optimism.
It would seem that one or other of these views about human rationality must be seriously wrong.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Philosophy of Psychology , pp. 105 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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