Quotes About Reasoning

Damasio's patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making.

Human rationality depends on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Somos criaturas profundamente intuitivas y son nuestros instintos los que guían nuestro razonamiento.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.

And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.49

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can't be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.

people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly."22

I didn't want to make the classic mistake of amateur evolutionary theorists, which is to pick a trait and then ask: "Can I think of a story about how this trait might once have been adaptive?" The answer to that question is almost always yes because reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment. We reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don't take people's moral arguments at face value. They're mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification)

first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

had found evidence for Hume's claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.

The difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:

Some ideas actually are false, and at some point the process of checking establishes their falsehood so firmly that to proceed as if they might be true becomes ridiculous. For

If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.28 Peirce, all those years ago, got it right.

That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief.

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.