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Will Fenton Thesis FENTON, WILLIAM, M.A. DECEMBER 2019 PHILOSOPHY ON THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING AND RATIONALITY (67 pp.) Thesis Advisor: David Pereplyotchik Many theorists in philosophy and psychology have held that reasoning is a capacity geared towards getting at truth and epitomized in logical deduction. Though this remains a prevalent view, it has recently been called into question by psychological research on biases in human reasoning. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber challenge both of these views and provide an alternative account of the nature and function of human reason. I will outline the grounds for holding that their "Interactionism" fits best with what is known about the evolution of human reasoning. Robert Brandom’s theory of rationality coincides with Interactionism in stressing the social nature of rationality, and in rejecting the notion that deduction is the key to understanding human reasoning. Although Brandom’s view has many virtues, it is not empirically informed. This raises questions about whether Brandom's theory can stand up in light of the putative success of Interactionism. I will argue that, far from being rival theories of the same subject matter, Interactionism can usefully supplement Brandom's theory of rationality, thereby correcting some of its deficiencies. ON THE PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING AND RATIONALITY A thesis submitted To Kent State University in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Master of Arts by William Fenton December, 2019 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by William Fenton B.A., Kent State University, 2016 M.A., Kent State University, 2019 Approved by _______________________________, Advisor David Pereplyotchik _______________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Michael Byron _______________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences James L. Blank TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………………..…iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….vi INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTERS 1. Formalist Approaches to Human Reasoning §1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………7 §2 The Rejection of Psychologism……………………………………………………………..8 §3 Rudiments of Formalist Thought…………………………………………………………..10 §4 Mental Logic Theory………………………………………………………………………13 §5 Dual Process Theory……………………………………………………………………….16 §6 The Language of Thought Hypothesis……………………………………………………..21 §7 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………23 2. Inferential Materialism and Logical Expressivism §1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..25 §2 Sellars on Material Rules of Inference…………………………………………………….27 §3.1 Logical Expressivism……………………………………………………………………34 §3.2 Semantic Inferentialism………………………………………………………………….36 §4 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………42 3. Inferentialism and Interactionism §1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………...44 §2 The Interactionist Theory of Reasoning……………………………………………………44 §3.1 Connections ……………………………………………………………………………...50 §3.2 Normative Pragmatics……………………………………………………………………52 iv §4.1 Reasoning and Mentalese………………………………………………………………..55 §4.2 Reasoning and Modularity………………………………………………………………57 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………60 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………..64 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to David, Dr. Deb, Dr. Aldea, Dr. Zavota, Dr. Fernandez, Dr. Pendleton, Dr. Barnbaum, Dr. Byron, Dr. Ryan, Dr. Ikuenobe, Dr. Kim, Alex Haas, Brant, Cara, Matt, Alex Martin, Stan, Nikita, Griffin, Jared, and Nick. vi On The Philosophy and Psychology of Reasoning and Rationality Introduction Formalism is the dominant view about rationality in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.1 The idea is that reasoning is a formal-computational process in the brain, geared towards the acquisition of true beliefs. Formalist approaches in psychology include mental logic theory, which seeks to explain our deductive reasoning capacities in terms of innate inference rules (Braine 1978; Braine and O’Brien 1998; Rips 1983, 1994), and dual process theory (Evans and Over 1996, Stanovich 1999, Kahneman 2011). Dual process theory holds that rational thinking—i.e., deduction and probabilistic reasoning—is a job for System 2, the slow, lazy, and sometimes rational part of the mind, while System 1 is in charge of fast, automatic, associative, intuitive processing. In philosophy and cognitive science, this idea finds its expression in the language of thought hypothesis, and the standard formulation of the computational theory of mind, according to which thoughts are represented by logically structured physical symbols in the brain (Fodor, 1975, 1987). To be clear, when I speak of the “formalist” in this paper, I intend to be referring to a wide swath of theorists—not only to those who subscribe to the language of thought hypothesis, mental logic theory, or dual process theory, 1 There has been a recent shift in the psychology of reasoning away from the “deduction paradigm,” and towards the “the new paradigm” (see Elqayam, Bonnefon, and Over, 2016). Although the probabilistic and dual process approaches that fall under the heading of the new paradigm are not logic-centered, they are still formalist, as that term is used here. !1 but more generally to any view that takes human reasoning to be formal in nature, or understands rationality narrowly in terms of adherence to formal rules of inference. In spite of the popularity of such views, I think that they are premised on questionable assumptions about the nature of reasoning and rationality. My critical aim in this essay is to motivate skepticism towards three formalist tenets in particular: (i) the hypothesis that reasoning is formal in nature, and carried out by the internal manipulation of symbols in accordance with formal rules of inference, (ii) the assumption that reasoning is primarily a solitary activity, geared solely towards the acquisition of true beliefs, and (iii) the formalist conception of rationality according to which agents are rational so long as they draw formally valid inferences, and irrational when they fail to draw such inferences. These ideas are interrelated: (i) is the central claim about reasoning present in all formalist theories, and it lends an air of plausibility to both (ii) and (iii) since it makes no mention of the environmental context that reasoning evolved to function in. Rather, (i) simply describes reasoning as an internal, formal psychological process, and since cognitive processes are private —in the trivial sense that there aren’t other agents inside of our heads while we reason—the solitary picture of reasoning and its putative function mentioned in (ii) seems intuitively correct. The standard of rationality invoked by (iii) is then jointly supported by both (i) and (ii). If reasoning is an internal formal-computational process, then it's not clear what purpose it might serve other than to produce true beliefs through formally valid inferential processes, and the failure to do so would appear to show that one’s reasoning skills are inadequate. The reader should bear in mind that it is the formalist paradigm that I am attempting to motivate skepticism towards in this essay. It is—of course—rational to have true beliefs, and beliefs are no doubt the outputs of inferential processes. The alternative view of reasoning and !2 rationality pieced together in ch. 3 is compatible with both of these claims. It differs, however, with respect to the characterization of the inferential processes involved in reasoning, and it is skeptical with regard to the conception of irrationality assumed by those working under the formalist paradigm. While it is certainly rational to produce formally valid arguments with true conclusions, it’s not obvious that we should always characterize the failure to do so as irrational behavior. For one thing, we should expect reasoning to fail, as it typically does (see ch. 1, §5), in contexts for which it is ill-suited in an evolutionary sense. This is one of the major lessons of the interactionist theory of reasoning (ch. 3, §2). Furthermore, materially valid arguments of the sort discussed in ch. 2 are not formally valid, but we would not characterize, e.g., the subjunctive inference from ‘X is a pen’ to ‘X would not disintegrate into thin air if I were to use it to write my signature’ as irrational on account of its not being a formally valid inference. And as Sellars points out (ch. 2, §2), we cannot say that our reason for endorsing such inferences is that they are enthymemes—that their true, “hidden” structures are formally valid. Considerations of this sort ought to motivate skepticism towards the idea—thesis (iii) above—that drawing formally valid inferences is the sole measure of human rationality. If what are clearly correct instances of reasoning do not qualify as rational by formalist standards, then it is not ordinary human reason that is inadequate but, rather, the formalist conception of it. My constructive aim will be to piece together two strands of theorizing that I believe jointly comprise a satisfying alternative approach. The primary contribution will be to integrate Robert Brandom’s semantic “inferentialism” with a promising new proposal in cognitive science —viz., “interactionism,” as developed by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in their 2017 book, The !3 Enigma of Reason. Although these theories differ in terms of methodology, inferentialism being a purely theoretical project, and interactionism an empirical hypothesis, I will argue that they are in agreement on fundamental
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