The Importance of Reasoning

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According to us, we're actually the only ones to reason at all. Other animals engage in a lot of complex thoughts and they can do a lot of, you know, wondrous things with their minds. But this ability we have of producing and evaluating reasons is something that as far as we can tell no other animal has. And so why do we bother? Good. I hope you can answer that question before at some point.

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.

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Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.

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