The “Great Rationality Debate”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/lv.2024.30.1.4496Keywords:
reasoning, biases, normativity, psychology, cognitionAbstract
Several decades ago, the cognitive psychology of reasoning developed a series of works that later became known as the heuristics and bias tradition (HS). How they were interpreted provoked a set of responses from both psychology and philosophy. This is because the idea that human beings are “systematically and predictably irrational” was associated with HS. This was called the pessimistic interpretation of rationality. Faced with this, a range of proposals in cognitive psychology emerged. Some of the results of these proposals were interpreted as basically optimistic, which clearly generated a tension with the pessimistic interpretation. The debate between some of these proposals reached a fever pitch where some theorists called it the “Great Rationality Debate.” The purpose of the work is to critically examine this debate. I will show that behind the discussions in such debate there is no single way to understand it and under the nickname of the “Great Rationality Debate” there are several theoretical problems, some descriptive, others evaluative and normative, which it is important to distinguish.
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