Human Rationality: Explanations from Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Logic

Abstract

In what follows I seek to answer the question on whether it is possible to integrate two different lines of research on human rationality: on the one hand, some philosophical lines of research of a cognitivist nature (Stanovich, 2002, 2009, 2016), and, on the other, lines of research on the logical reasoning of human agents and normative criteria (Harman, 1984; Morado, 2003; Aliseda, 2004). My answer to such questioning will be affirmative. To defend my point, I shall proceed as follows: first, in sec. 2 I offer the antecedents and characteristics of the cognitivist notion of “intelligence” that has greater acceptance today, the general theory of intelligence, also known as the g factor. Throughout sec. 3 I present the elements thanks to which it has been considered that although g factor manages to satisfactorily evaluate the phenomenon of intelligence, it ignores relevant characteristics from the perspective of what rationality has been considered to be (Sternberg, 1985; Stanovich, 2009). Then, in sec. 4, I present some notions of rationality available in literature on the philosophy of logic (Harman, 1984; Morado, 2003; Aliseda, 2004), and I evaluate what are the distinctive elements of each of these characterizations. In sec. 5, I defend that it is possible to improve our understanding of cognitive styles from the elements of the philosophy of logic exposed in section four.