The Enigma of Reason

By: Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense?

In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment.

This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists-why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.

©2017 Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (P)2017 Tantor

Starts with promise and devolves into incoherence.

The authors make a promising claim about why existing models of reasoning are wrong or incomplete. They then fail to make a coherent argument for their alternative model. The jerky performance didn't help.

Brilliant and important!

This is an important book. I might re-read parts of it over and over! So I bought myself a hard copy too!

Reason after the fact

I believe there is a slow consensus developing in Cognitive Science as to how Reason fits in to our daily life, and it is contrary to the long assumed belief that reason is a precursor to a decision.

In this book the author further develops the theory that we all for the most part use reason to justify an action, and there is good evidence that even long thought out Arguments are biased, and reason is only used after the fact to justify ones position.

Very, very interesting indeed!

A remarkable book

This is a marvelous piece of work. It presents a satisfying interpretation of the origins and the workings of reason that undermines the dominant view that sees human reason as flawed. Instead it argues that what appears as bugs is really a feature, if you understand the interactive role of reason. It is about justification and persuasion, not about deductive logic. It is social to the core in its intention and actually in its implementation, with deliberation playing a key role. The presentation is masterful. The book reviews massive amounts of well known evidence that has been there for a while, but without a paradigm to interpret it. The book has radically changed how I think about fundamental issues.

Alright

A good book, but I feel the narrators voice is quite hard to follow. The last two hours is quite interesting and no so “scientifical”.

Dense

While the material itself was good - but incredibly dense - I was eager to be *done* with the narration.

The early chapters made me feel like I was ill equipped to hear this book w/o an undergraduate degree in logic.

The narration was grating on my last nerve. In a book like this, the authors describe negation quite often. And someone narrating with a supremely proper Oxford English accent never says "at all," but more like "a toll." Tolls are paid on roads. They are not a linguistic negation. Pauses were just a bit too long and made the train of thought hard to follow (even on 1.25 speed). 14hrs of this ultra thick Oxford accent made yearn for just a smidge of some Murica Redneck narration.

Fernando

Took me a while to finish. Incredibly fascinating. Would recommend to those interested in metacognition.

bro spittin fr fr

one of the clearest, and, fittingly, unbiased accounts of reason ive ever seen (although i may admittedly be displaying my-side bias by saying this); felt like a breath of fresh air, a great clarification among the other antiquated and patchwork views on Reason that are so prevalent in most if not all fields of science and common understanding

reason is flawed but purposefully so

the authors make a solid case for the bias and laziness of reason to have evolved with the purpose of homo sapiens need to argue and defend their actions to others. since homo sapiens live in a highly social environment, reason should be considered another of the items in the toolbox that led to large-scale organization. beyond that, the authors convincingly portray reason as largely misunderstood and place it in its proper evolutionary perspective.

The case for Reason as an evolved module

I liked the depth the book gives to different psychological studies about how humans reason. How it explains reasoning with comparisons and it’s possible evolutionary path.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to understand why we can disagree even when undeniable facts are shown to us.

I gave it a 4 star rating because the first half of the book had what seemed to me as a complicated background. Necessary though, but a bit difficult for me maybe because I’m an engineer an not a psychologist. But after the foundations are laid, the books walks and guides you through the reasoning path with ease, while being very entertaining. the