Can evolution get us off the hook? Evaluating the ecological defence of human rationality

Boudry, Maarten; Vlerick, Michael; McKay, Ryan

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.08.025

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…In a similar vein, other forms of irrationality, such as preference reversals, sunk cost fallacies, and base rate fallacies, are now increasingly revisited in ways that are more sensitive to the ecological complexity of human reasoning (Gigerenzer 2008;Gigerenzer et al 2011). Previous research seems to have construed human reasoning in a rigid and uncharitable way, prematurely accusing people of committing fallacies (Boudry et al 2015). This is similar to the point we are making here: what appears to be a straightforward fallacy at first blush, may turn out to be quite elusive on closer inspection, as more details are filled in.…”

Section: A Few Other Examplessupporting

confidence: 62%

The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

2015

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Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life (few actual instances). On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are

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Section: A Few Other Examplessupporting

confidence: 62%

The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

2015

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“…Although a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article, we note that, from other perspectives, moral superiority may not be considered irrational at all (cf. Boudry, Vlerick, & McKay, 2015 ). For example, error management theorists (e.g., Haselton & Buss, 2000 ) might view underestimating the morality of others as quite rational.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Illusion of Moral Superiority

Tappin

McKay

2016

Social Psychological and Personality Science

114

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Most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral; yet regard the average person as distinctly less so. This invites accusations of irrationality in moral judgment and perception—but direct evidence of irrationality is absent. Here, we quantify this irrationality and compare it against the irrationality in other domains of positive self-evaluation. Participants (N = 270) judged themselves and the average person on traits reflecting the core dimensions of social perception: morality, agency, and sociability. Adapting new methods, we reveal that virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities, and the absolute and relative magnitude of this irrationality was greater than that in the other domains of positive self-evaluation. Inconsistent with prevailing theories of overly positive self-belief, irrational moral superiority was not associated with self-esteem. Taken together, these findings suggest that moral superiority is a uniquely strong and prevalent form of “positive illusion,” but the underlying function remains unknown.

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“…We would be ascribing rationality to an agent who lacks access to internal grounds that would make it possible, in Maynes' words, "to discern the truth him or herself." This implication of interactionism about reasoning intersects with debates over the compatibility of ecological rationality with internalist conceptions of rationality (Boudry, Vlerick, and McKay 2015) and epistemic "credit" as a condition for knowledge (Axtell 2017).…”

Section: The Interactionist Challenge Reframedmentioning

confidence: 97%

Come Now, Let Us Reason Together

Dacey

2020

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In defending a new framework for incorporating metacognitive debiasing strategies into critical thinking education, Jeffrey Maynes (2015; 2017) draws on ecological rationality theory to argue that in felicitous environments, agents will achieve greater epistemic success by relying on heuristics rather than more ideally rational procedures. He considers a challenge presented by Mercier and Sperber’s (2011; 2017) “interactionist” thesis that individual biases contribute to successful group reasoning. I argue that the challenge can be met without assuming an individualist ideal of the critical thinker as a solitary reasoner. Focusing on cognitive laziness and myside bias, I then argue that a more complete reckoning with the implications of interactionism about reasoning will require us to transcend individualism more fully to embrace the selection, design, regulation, and navigation of dialogic environments as central pedagogical aims of critical thinking education.

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Can evolution get us off the hook? Evaluating the ecological defence of human rationality

Cited by 17 publications

References 54 publications

The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

The Illusion of Moral Superiority

Come Now, Let Us Reason Together

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