Reviews for Rationality and reasoning

The average rating for Rationality and reasoning based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-06 00:00:00 Kelvin Pullman Great book. The human mind is nowadays understood as dual. That is, our individual mind is not one single mind, it rather behaves like two distinct minds. One mind might be intuitive, the other might be reflective. The former might be automatic, the latter might be controlled. The key feature of this view is quite controversial: most of our mind's work is implicit, heuristic, intuitive, and automatic. Moreover, our introspective registry -i.e. our stream of consciousness- seems to be a confabulation, an invention that has only a weak connection to what really happens deep in our brain. In other words, we live in a fantasy. A complex and believable fantasy, but not a reliable record. Our mind mostly lies. We lie to ourselves. This book by Jonathan ST. B. T. Evans and David E. Over is a classic in the field of cognitive science since its publication in 1996. The specific theory of the intuitive-reflective duality is clearly explained. More recently, a couple of research papers on this view recovered the main ideas of this book. A comprehensive perspective on dual-process theories was published during 2013 in Perspectives on Psychological Science by the same authors (Volume 8, Issue 3). It seems that working memory load is the criterion that differentiates between the two minds. Intuition does not load working memory, but reflection does heavily load such mental architecture. In other words, mental decoupling is highly demanding, while associative cognition works automatically. Convergent and divergent experimental evidence concerned with such distinction is thoroughly discussed in this book. In my opinion, this is a very good introduction to one of the most influential theories of the human mind. By the way, the development of a psychological theory derived from Evans' dual view to account for decision making drove Daniel Kahneman to the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. One last comment: What can these theories tell about literature? In which mind does literature grow? I think that a plausible answer might be quite complex, but automatic processes may have more relevance than we think.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-03 00:00:00 Gabriel Ferrari This would be on my reading list for any creative course. It presents a fascinating way of thinking and promoting creative working methods.