Abstract
Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy at little cost.. The ‘ought-can’ principle is satisfied, and rationality is meaningfully normative. We show, however, that this naturalization program is endangered by a computational wrinkle in the adaptation process taken to be responsible for this heuristics-based (‘ecological’) rationality: for the adaptation process to guarantee even minimal rationality, it requires astronomical computational resources, making the problem intractable. We consider various plausible auxiliary assumptions in attempt to remove this obstacle, and show that they do not succeed; intractability is a robust property of adaptation. We discuss the implications of our findings for the project of naturalizing rationality.
Highlights
Naturalists argue that we need theories of rationality that apply to actual people, and this means grounding our theories in empirical facts, for example about the cognitive capacities of humans
Our formal results significantly extend current understanding of the Adaptive Toolbox and the conditions under which toolboxes of heuristics can tractably be produced by adaptation processes
We have built on a finding by Otworowska et al (2018) that the toolbox adaption problem is NP-hard (Theorem 3.1), meaning that there cannot exist any tractable adaptation process that yields ecologically rational toolboxes
Summary
Naturalists argue that we need theories of rationality that apply to actual people, and this means grounding our theories in empirical facts, for example about the cognitive capacities of humans. We include constructive proposals for addressing intractability, and thereby improving our understanding of cognition At this point we would like to help to situate our argument by acknowledging that Ecological Rationality and the Adaptive Toolbox hypothesis are most often encountered within philosophy in the context of the so-called “rationality wars.”. This refers, broadly speaking, to the disagreement about whether or not human rationality should be characterized by classical, coherentist norms stemming from logic and probability theory. We wish to make clear that by advancing our specific critique, we in no way mean to cast doubt on the viability of Ecological Rationality in principle from a normative perspective, nor do we mean to question the fact that this research program has succeeded in placing many important observations (such as the relevance of decision and inference processes, the importance of contextual factors, and the limits of coherence criteria of rationality) at the center of the community’s attention (Rich 2016)
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