20th
The Argumentative Theory: ‘Reason evolved to win arguments, not seek truth’
“For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment.
Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion 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. (…)
The idea, labeled the argumentative theory of reasoning, is the brainchild of French cognitive social scientists, and it has stirred excited discussion (and appalled dissent) among philosophers, political scientists, educators and psychologists, some of whom say it offers profound insight into the way people think and behave. The Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted its April issue to debates over the theory, with participants challenging everything from the definition of reason to the origins of verbal communication.
“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
Indeed, Mr. Sperber, a member of the Jean-Nicod research institute in Paris, first developed a version of the theory in 2000 to explain why evolution did not make the manifold flaws in reasoning go the way of the prehensile tail and the four-legged stride. Looking at a large body of psychological research, Mr. Sperber wanted to figure out why people persisted in picking out evidence that supported their views and ignored the rest — what is known as confirmation bias — leading them to hold on to a belief doggedly in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
Other scholars have previously argued that reasoning and irrationality are both products of evolution. But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia. Gary F. Marcus, for example, a psychology professor at New York University and the author of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind,” says distortions in reasoning are unintended side effects of blind evolution. They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory. People are more likely to remember items they are familiar with, like their own beliefs, rather than those of others.
What is revolutionary about argumentative theory is that it presumes that since reason has a different purpose — to win over an opposing group — flawed reasoning is an adaptation in itself, useful for bolstering debating skills.
Mr. Mercier, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.
“People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” he said, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”
Think of the American judicial system, in which the prosecutors and defense lawyers each have a mission to construct the strongest possible argument. The belief is that this process will reveal the truth, just as the best idea will triumph in what John Stuart Mill called the “marketplace of ideas.” (…)
— Patricia Cohen, writer, journalist, Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth, The New York Times, June 14, 2011.
“Imagine, at some point in the past, two of our ancestors who can’t reason. They can’t argue with one another. And basically as soon as they disagree with one another, they’re stuck. They can’t try to convince one another. They are bound to keep not cooperating, for instance, because they can’t find a way to agree with each other. And that’s where reasoning becomes important.
We know that in the evolutionary history of our species, people collaborated a lot. They collaborated to hunt, they collaborated to gather food, and they collaborated to raise kids. And in order to be able to collaborate effectively, you have to communicate a lot. You have to tell other people what you want them to do, and you have to tell them how you feel about different things.
But then once people start to communicate, a host of new problems arise. The main problem posed by communication in an evolutionary context is that of deceiving interlocutors. When I am talking to you, if you accept everything I say then it’s going to be fairly easy for me to manipulate you into doing things that you shouldn’t be doing. And as a result, people have a whole suite of mechanisms that are called epistemic vigilance, which they use to evaluate what other people tell them.
If you tell me something that disagrees with what I already believe, my first reaction is going to be to reject what you’re telling me, because otherwise I could be vulnerable. But then you have a problem. If you tell me something that I disagree with, and I just reject your opinion, then maybe actually you were right and maybe I was wrong, and you have to find a way to convince me. This is where reasoning kicks in. You have an incentive to convince me, so you’re going to start using reasons, and I’m going to have to evaluate these reasons. That’s why we think reasoning evolved. (…)
We predicted that reasoning would work rather poorly when people reason on their own, and that is the case. We predicted that people would reason better when they reason in groups of people who disagree, and that is the case. We predicted that reasoning would have a confirmation bias, and that is the case. (…)
The starting point of our theory was this contrast between all the results showing that reasoning doesn’t work so well and the assumption that reasoning is supposed to help us make better decisions. But this assumption was not based on any evolutionary thinking, it was just an intuition that was probably cultural in the West, people think that reasoning is a great thing. (…)
That’s important to keep in mind is that reasoning is used in a very technical sense. And sometimes not only laymen, but philosophers, and sometimes psychologists tend to use “reasoning” in an overly broad way, in which basically reasoning can mean anything you do with your mind.
By contrast, the way we use the term “reasoning” is very specific. And we’re only referring to what reasoning is supposed to mean in the first place, when you’re actually processing reasons. Most of the decisions we make, most of the inferences we make, we make without processing reasons. (…) When you’re shopping for cereals at the supermarket, and you just grab a box of cereal not because you’ve reasoned through all the alternatives, but just because it’s the one you always buy. And you’re just doing the same thing. There is no reasoning involved in that decision. (…)
It’s only when you’re considering reasons, reasons to do something, reasons to believe, that you’re reasoning. If you’re just coming up with ideas without reasons for these ideas, then you’re using your intuitions.”
— The Argumentative Theory. A Conversation with Hugo Mercier, Edge, 4.27.2011
“Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis.
Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found. (…) p.1
Some of the evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls short of delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions reliably, but also that, in a variety of cases, it may even be detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes not because humans are bad at it but because they systematically look for arguments to justify their beliefs or their actions. The argumentative theory, however, puts such well-known demonstrations of “irrationality” in a novel perspective. Human reasoning is not a profoundly flawed general mechanism; it is a remarkably efficient specialized device adapted to a certain type of social and cognitive interaction at which it excels. (…)
People are good at assessing arguments and are quite able to do so in an unbiased way, provided they have no particular axe to grind. In group reasoning experiments where participants share an interest in discovering the right answer, it has been shown that truth wins. (…) p.58
What makes [Sherlock] Holmes such a fascinating character is precisely his preternatural turn of mind operating in a world rigged by Conan Doyle, where what should be inductive problems in fact have deductive solutions. More realistically, individuals may develop some limited ability to distance themselves from their own opinion, to consider alternatives and thereby become more objective. Presumably this is what the 10% or so of people who pass the standard Wason selection task do. But this is an acquired skill and involves exercising some imperfect control over a natural disposition that spontaneously pulls in a different direction. (…)” p. 60
— Hugo Mercier, postdoc in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Sperber, French social and cognitive scientist, Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory, (pdf) Cambridge University Press 2011, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Illustration source)
See also:
☞ Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, Reasoning as a Social Competence (pdf), Collective Wisdom Landemore, H. and Elster, J. (Eds.)
☞ Hugo Mercier, On the Universality of Argumentative Reasoning, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Vol. 11, pp. 85–113, 2011
