Review

Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way? In The Enigma of Reason, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question… [Their] argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to cooperate. Cooperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems…[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups. — Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker

The Enigma of Reason is a comprehensive and well‐motivated overview of the contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on reasoning. This is especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited. — Darren Frey, Science

Brilliant…Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well…Timely and necessary. — Julian Baggini, Financial Times

Mercier and Sperber believe that reason’s main utility is in our interactions with others, not sitting alone in our rooms and philosophizing. Reason is what enables us to explain our thoughts and actions to others. — Jonathan Foiles, Psychology Today

As evolutionary psychologists, Mercier and Sperber ask what might have been adaptive for our ancestors and thus built into our brains. Some have argued for modules specialized for reasoning about particular topics. But Mercier and Sperber argue for a single module that can frame an argument and its conclusion: the former aids cooperation and the latter communication. So, the ultimate goal of reasoning is persuasion. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious theory presented with brilliant insights, profound scholarship, and entertaining anecdotes. — Philip Johnson-Laird, Princeton University

This is a terrific book. The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read. — Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

Original, persuasive, and deftly argued, The Enigma of Reason puts forward a new and rather surprising thesis that the proper (evolutionary) functioning of reasoning is to persuade others via argumentation. This book will challenge your preconceptions about the mind’s internal logic and why it exists. A compelling read and a novel contribution to the literature on reasoning. — Clark Barrett, University of California, Los Angeles

I Shaking Dogma

1 Reason on Trial

2 Psychologists’ Travails

II understanding inference

3 From Unconscious Inferences to Intuitions

4 Modularity

5 Cognitive Opportunism

6 Metarepresentions

III rethinking reason

7 How We Use Reasons

8 Could Reason Be a Module?

9 Reasoning: Intuition and Reflection

10 Reason: What Is It For?

IV what reason can and cannot do

11 Why Is Reasoning Biased?

12 Quality Control: How We Evaluate Arguments

13 The Dark Side of Reason

14 A Reason for Everything

15 The Bright Side of Reason

V reason in the wild

16 Is Human Reason Universal?

17 Reasoning about Moral and Political Topics

18 Solitary Geniuses?

About the Authors

Hugo Mercier is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, working in the Cognitive Science Institute Marc Jeannerod in Lyon.

Dan Sperber is a researcher in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University, Budapest, and in the Institut Jean Nicod at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris.