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Evolution, Rationality, and Coherence Criteria

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Abstract

How much irrationality should we ascribe to human cognition? Psychological evidence suggests that people’s reasoning is largely inaccurate, but according to an evolutionary argument for rationality (henceforth, EAR), we have good reasons to believe that this is not so. To solve the conflict between psychological evidence and EAR, commentators have usually put the blame either on the psychological evidence, arguing that inaccurate reasoning appears only in the context of lab studies, or on the premises of EAR, charged with not being in line with the concepts and findings of evolutionary biology. I argue that Hammond’s distinction between two distinct criteria of rationality, namely coherence and correspondence, might shed new light on this apparent conflict. I show that EAR might be interpreted in two different ways, and that EAR and psychological evidence might in fact be both correct if they appeal to different criteria of accurate reasoning. Moreover, evolutionary considerations have been recently used not to oppose the existence of violations of norms of coherence but rather to explain it.

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Notes

  1. In well-known studies of the Wason selection task, most subjects do not apply the rules of material implication. When asked to check instances of P → Q, subjects overlook the relevance of ¬ Q as potential falsifiers. Moreover, in the case of the conjunction fallacy, people rate the probability of the conjunction as higher than that of the single event, despite the fact that this violates the conjunction rule probability theory. Specifically, most people accept that P (A & B) > P (A), while probability theory states that P (A & B) ≤ P (A) and P (A & B) ≤ P(B).

  2. It is not entirely clear to me, however, whether this behavior cannot be reinterpreted as a coherent strategy, in spite of the behavioral inconsistencies.

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Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to Werner Callebaut, editor of this journal, an anonymous referee for this journal, Michela Massimi, Till Vierkant, Lars Penke, and Matteo Colombo for their constructive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was partly funded by a Studentship awarded by the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS) of the University of Edinburgh. The usual disclaimers about any error or mistake in the paper apply.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK

    Andrea Polonioli

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Polonioli, A. Evolution, Rationality, and Coherence Criteria. Biol Theory 9, 309–317 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0163-1

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