Why humans possess limited reasoning skills
“Stripped of a lot
of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument
runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is
our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as
difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course
of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical
problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it
developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
"Reason is an
adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,”
Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just
plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from
a social “interactionist” perspective.”