Hugo Mercier > Quotes

“It is based, however, on a convenient fiction: most reasons are after-the-fact rationalizations. Still, this fictional use of reasons plays a central role in human interactions, from the most trivial to the most dramatic.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

“Whereas reason is commonly viewed as the use of logic, or at least some system of rules to expand and improve our knowledge and our decisions, we argue that reason is much more opportunistic and eclectic and is not bound to formal norms. The main role of logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, highlighting and often exaggerating their force. So, why did reason evolve? What does it provide, over and above what is provided by more ordinary forms of inference, that could have been of special value to humans and to humans alone? To answer, we adopt a much broader perspective. Reason, we argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. These two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“When like-minded people argue, all they do is provide each other with new reasons supporting already held beliefs. Just like solitary reasoners, groups of like-minded people can be victims of belief polarization, overconfidence, and belief perseverance.”
― Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

“Reason is flawed, but how badly? How should success or failure in reasoning be assessed? What are the mechanisms responsible? In spite of their often bitter disagreements, parties to these polemics have failed to question a basic dogma. All have taken for granted that the job of reasoning is to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions. If you accept the dogma, then, yes, it is quite puzzling that reason should fall short of being impartial, objective, and logical. It is paradoxical that, quite commonly, reasoning should fail to bring people to agree and, even worse, that it should often exacerbate their differences. But why accept the dogma in the first place?”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic countries. The acronym is well deserved,”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Humans reason when they are trying to convince others or when others are trying to convince them. Solitary reasoning occurs, it seems, in anticipation or rehashing of discussions with others and perhaps also when one finds oneself holding incompatible ideas and engages in a kind of discussion with oneself.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“take reason out of the interactive context in which it evolved, and nothing guarantees that it will yield adaptive results.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“What these results—and many others47—show is that people have no general preference for confirmation. What they find difficult is not looking for counterevidence or counterarguments in general, but only when what is being challenged is their own opinion.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“In human communication, comprehension does not automatically secure acceptance. (Do you, for instance automatically believe everything you understand when reading a book like this one? Of course not!)”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Paul is looking at Linda and Linda is looking at John. Paul is married but John is not. Is a person who is married looking at a person who is not married?”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“The elephant trunk is a type of nose. However impressive it may be, it would not make sense to think of it as the epitome of noses.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“As Popper put it, “In searching for the truth, it may be our best plan to start by criticizing our most cherished beliefs.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Descartes was the most forceful of reason’s many advocates. Reason has also had many, often passionate, detractors. Its efficacy has been questioned. Its arrogance has been denounced. The religious reformer Martin Luther was particularly scathing: “Reason is by nature a harmful whore. But she shall not harm me, if only I resist her. Ah, but she is so comely and glittering.… See to it that you hold reason in check and do not follow her beautiful cogitations. Throw dirt in her face and make her ugly.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“The fact that people are good at evaluating others’ reasons is the nail in the coffin of the intellectualist approach. It means that people have the ability to reason objectively, rejecting weak arguments and accepting strong ones, but that they do not use these skills on the reasons they produce. The apparent weaknesses of reason production are not cognitive failures; they are cognitive features.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“[T]wo major features of the production of reasons: it is biased— people overwhelmingly find reasons that support their previous beliefs— and it is lazy— people do not carefully scrutinize their own reasons. Combined, these two traits spell disaster for the lone reasoner. As she reasons, she finds more and more arguments for her views, most of them judged to be good enough. These reasons increase her confidence and lead her to extreme positions.”
― Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason

“It will be serviceable both to run over the arguments which you yourself have employed separately, and also (which is a matter requiring still greater art) to unite the opposite arguments with your own; and to show how completely you have done away with the arguments which were brought against you. And so, by a brief comparison, the recollection of the hearer will be refreshed both as to the confirmation which you adduced, and as to the reprehension which you employed.49”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Psychologists claim to have shown that human reason is flawed. The idea that reason does its job quite poorly has become commonplace. Experiment after experiment has convinced psychologists and philosophers that people make egregious mistakes in reasoning. And it is not just that people reason poorly, it is that they are systematically biased. The wheels of reason are off balance.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“beyond the ordinary pragmatic procedures of comprehension we all use all the time. Securing comprehension is, however, only half of the goal of communication. A speaker typically wants not only to be understood but also to be believed (or obeyed), to have, in other terms, some influence on her audience. A hearer typically wants not just to understand what the speaker means but, in so doing, to learn something about the world.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“at the piece of furniture that appears in Figure 16 on the following page. Hardly a well-designed chair, is it? The seat is so low that you’d practically have to squat on it. The back is too high; the upper bar is a horizontal slab on which you could not lean comfortably. How come? Actually, this is not a chair. It is a church kneeler. The height is right for kneeling. The “back” is in fact the front, and the upper slab is there to rest not one’s back but one’s praying hands. Once this artifact’s real function is recognized, what looked like flaws turn out to be well-designed features. Like the object in Figure 16, reason seems to have an obvious function: to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions on their own. After all, if using reason doesn’t help one reach better beliefs and choices, what is it good for? However, like a kneeler used as a chair, reasoning serves this function very poorly.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Feedback plays an important role even in simple forms of argumentation. Take this banal exchange:”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up. For example, our modern environments make some psychoactive”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Far from it. Imagine what communication would be like if people automatically believed or did what they were told. Communicators might be quite satisfied; their ability to influence gullible and docile listeners would be without limit. Addressees, on the other hand, accepting everything they were told, would be prey to all kinds of misinformation and manipulation, not a satisfactory condition at all.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Charles Taber and Milton Lodge gave participants a variety of arguments on controversial issues, such as gun control or affirmative action, and asked them to list their thoughts relative to the arguments.29 They divided the participants into two groups: those with low and those with high knowledge of political issues. The low-knowledge group exhibited a solid confirmation bias: they listed twice as many thoughts supporting their side of the issue than thoughts going the other way. But knowledge did not protect the participants from bias. The participants in the high-knowledge group found so many thoughts supporting their favorite position that they gave none going the other way. Greater political knowledge only amplified their confirmation bias.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“The “production of reasons” row is really bad for the intellectualist approach. When people reason on their own, they mostly produce reasons that support their decisions or their preconceived ideas, and they don’t bother to make sure that the reasons are strong. As”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“We also asked some participants to think hard about the problem and to justify their answers. A few of them did get it right. But most got it wrong, and because they had thought hard about it, they were really sure that their wrong answer was right. Most of them said that they were “extremely confident” or even “as confident as the things I’m most confident about.” But that didn’t make them less likely to change their mind when confronted with the argument above than participants who had had their doubts. Even though they could have sworn that the conclusion was wrong, when they read the argument, they were swayed all the same.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Human communication, however, is definitely not limited to topics of common interest where truthfulness and trust are mutually advantageous to the interlocutors. Linguistic signals can be produced at will to inform or to mislead. Unlike the honeybee’s waggle dance or the female baboon’s sexual swelling, linguistic signals are not intrinsically reliable. Human communication takes place not only among close kin or cooperators but also with competitors and strangers. Lying and deception are in everybody’s repertoire. Even children start expecting and practicing some degree of deception around the age of four.”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“Among the Lozi of Zambia, Max Gluckman discovered a culture focused on debates with a rich vocabulary to describe the quality (or lack thereof) of someone’s argumentation: kuyungula—to speak on matters without coming to the point kunjongoloka—to wander away from the subject when speaking kubulela siweko—to talk without understanding muyauluki—a judge who speaks without touching on the important points at issue siswasiwa—a person who gets entangled in words siyambutuki—a talker at random30”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

“For humans, knowing what to expect of each other is a crucial cognitive challenge. How is this challenge met? How do humans succeed in forming, if not perfect, at least adequate mutual expectations? The most common answer consists in invoking two mechanisms: norms at the sociological level, and understanding of the mental states of others at the psychological level. At the level”
― Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason