Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.
Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990) Italian existential philosopher
The human mind can achieve fantastic things. One of them is “…our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance” as Daniel Kahneman notes in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Our cognitive hubris allows us to think that we’re smarter than we actually are, to stubbornly deny the overwhelming evidence that human cognition is in fact a messy subjective mix of facts and feelings, intellect and instinct, reason and gut reaction. Pure, objective, analytical ‘just-the-facts’ Cartesian reason is a wonderful goal – “God’s crowning gift to man” as Sophocles put it – but it’s an unachievable myth. And believing in it is dangerous.
Such misplaced pride in human intellect leads to what in my book, How Risky Is It, Really?, I have labeled The Risk Perception Gap…when we are more afraid of some threats than the evidence warrants, or less afraid of some perils than the evidence warns. This gap, worrying too much or not enough, is risky all by itself. Smug confidence in human reason, and the belief that once fully educated and informed people will then make the objectively ‘right’ decision about risk, only widens the gap and increases the danger.
And as cognitive science has produced more and more evidence about the limits of reason and the subjective nature of risk perception, many leading thinkers have called for what cognitive scientist Gary Marcus calls “Cognitive humility”, suggesting that “knowing the limits of our minds can help us to us to make better reasoners. Which is pretty much what Abbagnano said when we began, that “Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.
We have learned a great deal in the past several years that not only teaches us that our reason is fallible, but that explains why reason fails, and how. It is time to give our understanding of this fallibility a much more prominent place in the logic of how we make decisions to keep ourselves healthy and safe, both as individuals and as a society. But it must begin with a new more humble post-Enlightenment attitude about the limits of what the human brain can accomplish. As Descartes himself said; “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” Including how smart you think you are, and how objectively rational you think you and people in general can ever be.