The Social Side of Reasoning - NYTimes.com - 0 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...d-the-social-side-of-reasoning
reasoning psychology argumentation truth pragmatism social
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 11
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We have a very hard time sticking to rules of deductive logic, and we constantly make basic errors in statistical reasoning. Most importantly, we are strongly inclined to “confirmation-bias”: we systematically focus on data that support a view we hold and ignore data that count against it.
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These facts suggest that our evolutionary development has not done an especially good job of making us competent reasoners. Sperber and Mercier, however, point out that this is true only if the point of reasoning is to draw true conclusions.
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it makes sense to think that the evolutionary point of human reasoning is to win arguments, not to reach the truth.
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The root of the dilemma is the distinction between seeking the truth and winning an argument. The distinction makes sense for cases where someone does not care about knowing the truth and argues only to convince other people of something, whether or not it’s true.
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how do I justify a belief and so come to know that it’s true? There are competing philosophical answers to this question, but one fits particularly well with Sperber and Mercier’s approach. This is the view that justification is a matter of being able to convince other people that a claim is correct
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The key point is that justification — and therefore knowledge of the truth — is a social process. This need not mean that claims are true because we come to rational agreement about them. But such agreement, properly arrived at, is the best possible justification of a claim to truth.
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This pragmatic view understands seeking the truth as a special case of trying to win an argument: not winning by coercing or tricking people into agreement, but by achieving agreement through honest arguments.
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The important practical conclusion is that finding the truth does require winning arguments, but not in the sense that my argument defeats yours. Rather, we find an argument that defeats all contrary arguments.
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This symbiosis is an instructive example of how philosophy and empirical psychology can fruitfully interact.