In "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth", Patricia Cohen explains that contrary to prevailing belief, Mercier and Sperber's argumentative theory argues that reason did not evolve to serve the pursuit of truth but simply as a tool to win arguments, that is, to convince people. As Cohen notes, the idea that human reasoning, our rationality, like everything else about us, is an evolved characteristic is nothing new. What is new in Mercier and Sperber's explanation of human behaviour and psychology is that since bad reasoning often works as well, it has the same evolutionary pressure keeping it hard-wired in human nature: we have not become more rational animals because in debate, in arguments, having better reasons is only one way to win, and it's winning arguments, not being right or getting closer to truths, that matters to evolution. Attempts throughout history to make people more rational and root out unreason have therefore not surprisingly tended to fail simply because human nature, our basic biology, is against them. It was their desire to explain the persistent such human tendencies as confirmation bias and to strongly maintain beliefs that are contrary to all evidence and reason that first led Mercier and Sperber to their theory that reason was about winning debates rather than acquiring truth.
However, Mercier and Sperber also "contend that as people became better at producing and picking apart arguments, their assessment skills evolved as well" (p. 2, ¶ 4), which is how they explain the fact that groups do actually manage to reach agreement and make decisions: the members are better able to pick apart and show the defects in bad arguments, thereby helping their own, better, arguments to win. Reason does often work to lead to truth, but only by accident because truth often makes for more forceful arguments. In summarizing some of the controversy surrounding the argumentative theory or reasoning, Cohen includes both dissenting views, such as that of Darcia Narvaez, who counters that Mercier and Sperber's ideas are just one more instance of the prevailing view that "everything we do is motivated by selfishness and manipulating others, which is, in my view, crazy" (p. 1, ¶ 11). On the other hand, Cohen also also notes that the theory is claimed to have practical implications for education, such as helping children more effectively learn abstract subjects such as mathematics by letting them work in groups so that argument can give their built in assessment skills a chance to work as they reason to win. Finally, Cohen reports that Mercier argues that in the political realm, the group use of argument and assessment show democracy to be the "the best form of government for evolutionary reasons, regardless of philosophical or moral rationales" (p. 2, ¶ 7).
This report touches on so many issues that new and different responses were popping into mind as I moved from sentence to sentence. The unrelated one first: I realised when doing the first quotation that the breaking up of their articles into pages, which had often struck me as a bother since it entails clicking and loading a new page to get to the next part of the story in the New York Times is actually not such a bad idea. It makes citing quotations much easier since you can give the page number and then counting down the paragraphs is much easier.
A more on topic response as I was reading was, "What's so new?" And that's all I have time for now.
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