The Role of Reason in Reasoning

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Roxanne Jones: I want to be a tiny bit of a skeptic just to give you the chance to push back. So essentially we think of reason has it in two sides. On one hand, we use reason to produce reasons and arguments and justifications. And when we do that, we are quite thoroughly biased. But there's this other side of reason which is how we evaluate arguments. When someone else gives you an argument, then your incentives are very different. Your incentives are much closer to the kind of normative goal of having an objective, objectively true answer.

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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