Have you ever thought of yourself as a philosopher of sorts, seeking to find the truth in the world using your brain’s pre-wired capacity to see the reasonable side of things? Well, according to the New York Times and a group of French cognitive scientists, you’re doing it wrong.
Or rather, that’s not what rationality was evolutionarily meant for. Instead, it was meant as a way to win arguments. This makes sense, of course; who hasn’t had an argument in which you’ve yelled at someone over their completely unreasonable patterns of thinking? And everybody’s tried to argue their way out of something using what they see at the time as the complete and utter truth.
According to the article, the theory (labeled the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning) is that both rationality and irrationality are simply hard-wired compulsions to “triumph in the debating arena” :
According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth.
Some academic fields are, of course, arguing against all of this, saying that it simplifies the uses of reason too much. So the question is: What do YOU think? Use logic in your answer, of course.
(Slashdot via New York Times)
(Photo via Self Impovement Saga)
