Nothing new under the sun, or the moon, or both

Abstract

The investigation of the mechanisms and principles of human reasoning is as ancient as the history of philosophy. It has always been clear that there is something special that allows humans, to a greater degree than other animals, to think about future states, make plans, have rational discussions, handle complex social situations, and invent marvelous things such as science. What this “something” was, however, has remained buried in mystery, and it still partially is. At the same time, demonstrations of human rationality have always been countered by staggering examples of bad reasoning, in history, in psychology, and, as many people (not us) will admit, in personal experience. The camp of psychologists and philosophers has thus been divided among those who were more impressed by the successes of humans against nature (Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Kant, or closer to us, the neopositivists; in psychology, Johnson-Laird, Holyoak, Newell and Simon, the Mental Logic camp) and those who were more impressed by their miserable failures (Bacon, Schoepnhauer, Kierkegaard, the nichilists, or the deconstructivists; in psychology, Tversky, Kahnemann, Evans, etc.). The latter group has argued that developing a theory of rational/logical reasoning is doomed because there is no object to study. The former group has tried to explain the (admittedly limited) rationality of the mind by developing theories of the mental representations and processes involved in deductive, causal, or probabilistic reasoning (O'Brien, 1995; Braine and O'Brien, 1998; Goldvarg and Johnson-Laird, 2001; Johnson-Laird, 2010): call this approach the Not-So-New Paradigm.