Rationality Restored: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Certain beliefs or judgements are indisputably irrational. When a victim of the Capgras delusion “believes” that her husband has been replaced by an impostor, her belief is definitely irrational. But irrationality is not confined to mental illness. Self-deception, wishful thinking, and denial are widespread, non-pathological cognitive phenomena that are also irrational. People in perfect mental health deceive themselves about their chances of winning the lottery, the intellectual talents of their kids, the fidelity of their husbands/wives, the probability that they receive a salary increase, etc. In short, mentally healthy people hold irrational beliefs in diverse kinds of circumstance. Do these various irrational beliefs have something in common? Is there anything that makes them all irrational? As its name suggests, the general purpose of the project “Irrationality” is to answer these questions and to offer, thereby, a philosophical account of cognitive irrationality.

Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated with the Heuristics and Biases tradition, on which much of our reasoning and decision making is normatively problematic because it relies on heuristics and biases rather than rational principles. In this article we describe briefly some of the evidence that has been invoked in support of this contention and consider some of the more prominent critical responses, especially from evolutionary psychology and dual-process theorists.

R. Elio (ed.) Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 236-268., 2002

The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, 2004

Scientific American Mind, 2016

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015

Adaptive rationality (AR) theorists question the manner in which psychologists have typically assessed rational behavior and cognition. According to them, human rationality is adaptive, and the biases reported in the psychological literature are best seen as the result of using normative standards that are too narrow. As it turns out, their challenge is also quite controversial, and several aspects of it have been called into question. Yet, whilst it is often suggested that the lack of cogency comes about due to the implausibility of the alternative normative framework, in this paper I articulate a different strategy to resist the revolutionary rhetoric of AR. As I argue here, even if we accept the normative framework of AR, the challenge from AR is less damaging than usually accepted. In particular, I challenge the claim that biases reported in the literature should be conceived of as violations of axiomatic rationality. I argue that the category of bias refers instead to a range of heterogeneous phenomena and that, since several important families of biases are not just violations of axiomatic rationality, these are not vulnerable to the AR challenge. In fact, I also show that the families I consider here look like plausible cases of irrational behavior from the perspective of AR, and that the outcome of my analysis does not sit well with AR theorists' claim that people are generally successful at achieving prudential and epistemic goals.

Current psychology of human reasoning is divided into several different approaches. For instance, there is a major dispute over the question whether human beings are able to apply norms of the formal models of rationality such as rules of logic, or probability and decision theory, correctly. While researchers following the “heuristics and biases” approach argue that we deviate systematically from these norms, and so are perhaps deeply irrational, defenders of the “bounded rationality” approach think not only that the evidence for this conclusion is problematic but also that we should not, at least not very often, use formal norms in reasoning. I argue that while the evidence for heuristics and biases is indeed questionable, the bounded rationality approach has its limits too. Most especially, we should not infer that formal norms play no role in a comprehensive theory of rationality. Instead, formal and bounded rules of reasoning might even be connected in a more comprehensive theory of rationality.

1984

This paper reviews the main research in the' areaof human reasoning and rational thinking to determine if man is either an "innately inefficient thinking machine" or if man's irrationality is "rooted in basic human nature," as Ellis (1976) suggests. The paper focuses on the work of two*English theorists, Mason and Johnson-Laird, and two American psychologists, Tversky and Kahneman. Emphasis-is placed on implications for improving the ability to think and reason in a rational-and logical fashion. A number of-experiments are reviewed, dealinq with decision makinge.problem'solving, psychotherapy, creativity, risk, prediction, generalization, and rational emotivi therapy. Some generalconclusions are drawn, suggesting that lost people tend to think simplistically, to make choices without considering allthe variables and all of the information, and ignore long term goals. (JAC)

Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 2020