The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

"They address one of the central questions of cognitive psychology, and also of philosophy, I suppose, which is what is reason? What’s the function of reason and rationality? They give, I think, a remarkably fresh, original and revelatory answer. I don’t agree with every aspect of their argument, but they reframe the whole question in quite an exciting way. Reason is meant to be humanity’s gift, our special faculty, the thing that sets us apart from the animals. Because they come from an evolutionary psychology background, they have this question, which is: Okay, so if we evolved reason in order to help us think—which is the conventional view of what it’s for—then why is it so flawed? Why is this capacity to reason so faulty that if you bought it from a shop, you’d just send it back saying there’s a problem with it? For example, confirmation bias, which means you only look for evidence for things that you already believe in. We do this all the time. Once we are on one side of an argument, we tend to notice things that support our side, and neglect or reason away things from the other side. That distorts our view of reality and makes us worse at thinking. Birds have evolved wings and wings are pretty much perfectly designed for flying. They add a bit of weight, so there’s a bit of a trade-off, but they’re really good at getting off the ground. Why would we have evolved this special capacity that’s so badly flawed? That’s why the book is called The Enigma of Reason : that’s the enigma. And their answer is that we’ve been looking at reason the wrong way round. We think about it as an attribute of individuals, of individuals in magnificent isolation. If you think about Rodin’s The Thinker , he’s thinking very deeply and using this power of reason to better apprehend the world. They argue that, in fact, we evolved in order to collaborate with others. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s uncontroversial now that the reason humans rule the planet is that we’re better at cooperating and being collaborative than many other species. In their view, reason is a main tool that we use to collaborate. It evolved to help us argue, for each of us to make our case, and contribute our case to the general pool. At that point others can propose a better case and try and knock down our case—whether it’s where to build this camp, or how to hunt down this baboon, or how to build a computer or how to run a country. The function of reason is to throw up lots of hypotheses and then, through a process of Darwinian selection, the strongest arguments will survive, and the weakest ones get rooted out very quickly. That explains confirmation bias because when you look at it in that perspective, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Confirmation bias is driving you to make the best possible case you can, really digging up all the reasons you can think of to make your case stronger, to give it the best shot within the general pool. And that makes the stock of arguments better. It doesn’t mean that you are better at being right, necessarily—and, as we see, it actually has distorting effects at the individual level—but it does help the group get it right. Once you think about it like that, you can go, ‘Ah, OK, that’s why conflict and disagreement are so important—because by ourselves we’re pretty flawed reasoners, we’re not very good thinkers.’ We all carry around much less knowledge than we know. We all think we know how a toilet works or how a zip works but when people are asked in studies, they either have no idea, or very little idea, or have got it completely wrong. We’re relying on everybody else’s knowledge all the time. We think collaboratively. And so disagreement and conflict is one of the most important ways in which we donate our small contribution to the pool, raising other people’s intelligence and insight at the same time."