Rationality and reasoning

Evans, Jonathan St. B. T.

This book addresses an apparent paradox in the psychology of thinking. On the one hand, human beings are a highly successful species; on the other, intelligent adults are known to exhibit numerous errors and biases in laboratory studies of reasoning and decision making. There has been much debate among both philosophers and psychologists about the implications of such studies for human rationality. The authors argue that this debate is marked by a confusion between two distinct notions: (a) personal rationality (rationality[subscript 1]) the degree to which people reliably achieve their individual goals, and (b) impersonal rationality (rationality[subscript 2]) the degree to which people perform inferences or act for reasons sanctioned by some abstract normative standard, like formal logic or probability theory. Evans and Over argue that people have a high degree of...

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