The Importance of Reason

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"I'm too old to really imagine that I will have a dramatic change of my mind on these things," he says. "It's a mission to imagine an alternative world in which, you know, some new experimental data comes up and that completely leads logically to a change in the framework" The problem is that reason is not by far the only cognitive mechanism we have or are we used? We do have an incentive to some extent to appear maybe more coherent than we are,. He adds: 'We've all been a bad face'

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.