The Enigma of Reason
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Narrated by:
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Liam Gerrard
About this listen
Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense?
In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment.
This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists-why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.
©2017 Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (P)2017 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases.
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Difficult to interpret.
- By Ryan Arnold on 12-21-15
By: Mahzarin R. Banaji, and others
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Being Logical
- A Guide to Good Thinking
- By: D.Q. McInerny
- Narrated by: Al Kessel
- Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Logic is synonymous with reason, judgment, sense, wisdom, and sanity. Being logical is the ability to create concise and reasoned arguments - arguments that build from given premises, using evidence, to a genuine conclusion. But mastering logical thinking also requires studying and understanding illogical thinking, both to sharpen one's own skills and to protect against incoherent or deliberately misleading reasoning. Elegant, pithy, and precise, Being Logical breaks logic down to its essentials through clear analysis, accessible examples, and focused insights.
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Very Easy To Absorb
- By Patrick A. Blank on 04-02-20
By: D.Q. McInerny
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Noise
- A Flaw in Human Judgment
- By: Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.
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Disappointing
- By Z28 on 05-31-21
By: Daniel Kahneman, and others
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Big Gods
- How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
- By: Ara Norenzayan
- Narrated by: Paul Nixon
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.
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Great read
- By paro on 02-27-24
By: Ara Norenzayan
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Where the Conflict Really Lies
- Science, Religion, & Naturalism
- By: Alvin Plantinga
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook is a long-awaited major statement by a pre-eminent analytic philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, on one of our biggest debates - the compatibility of science and religion. The last twenty years has seen a cottage industry of books on this divide, but with little consensus emerging. Plantinga, as a top philosopher but also a proponent of the rationality of religious belief, has a unique contribution to make. His theme in this short book is that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord.
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The reader makes or breaks an audiobook.
- By Alec on 02-16-15
By: Alvin Plantinga
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Epistemology
- An Audio Guide
- By: Robert M. Martin
- Narrated by: Richard Aspel
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. Without knowledge, scientific enquiry is meaningless and we can’t analyse the world around us. But what exactly is knowledge and how do we obtain it? Should we trust our senses? When is belief knowledge? Presuming no prior experience, Robert Martin covers everything in the topic from scepticism and induction to Kant’s transcendentalism. Clear and readable, this audiobook is essential for philosophy students and a much needed introduction for the general reader.
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Going to hear it again
- By R Durero on 08-02-14
By: Robert M. Martin
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Truth and Truthfulness
- By: Bernard Williams
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combinationof passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.
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Content is excellent but the sound quality falters
- By Andy B. on 09-08-23
By: Bernard Williams
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Out of Our Heads
- You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
- By: Alva Noe
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.
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A bold, yet ultimately unsupported, hypothesis
- By Keith Pyne-Howarth on 01-17-10
By: Alva Noe
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What listeners say about The Enigma of Reason
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Danie
- 04-13-19
Starts with promise and devolves into incoherence.
The authors make a promising claim about why existing models of reasoning are wrong or incomplete. They then fail to make a coherent argument for their alternative model. The jerky performance didn't help.
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- Harish G. Naik
- 03-28-21
Brilliant and important!
This is an important book. I might re-read parts of it over and over! So I bought myself a hard copy too!
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- Philomath
- 12-02-17
Reason after the fact
I believe there is a slow consensus developing in Cognitive Science as to how Reason fits in to our daily life, and it is contrary to the long assumed belief that reason is a precursor to a decision.
In this book the author further develops the theory that we all for the most part use reason to justify an action, and there is good evidence that even long thought out Arguments are biased, and reason is only used after the fact to justify ones position.
Very, very interesting indeed!
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37 people found this helpful
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- Ricardo Hausmann
- 07-16-19
A remarkable book
This is a marvelous piece of work. It presents a satisfying interpretation of the origins and the workings of reason that undermines the dominant view that sees human reason as flawed. Instead it argues that what appears as bugs is really a feature, if you understand the interactive role of reason. It is about justification and persuasion, not about deductive logic. It is social to the core in its intention and actually in its implementation, with deliberation playing a key role. The presentation is masterful. The book reviews massive amounts of well known evidence that has been there for a while, but without a paradigm to interpret it. The book has radically changed how I think about fundamental issues.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Carlos
- 03-12-21
Alright
A good book, but I feel the narrators voice is quite hard to follow. The last two hours is quite interesting and no so “scientifical”.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. Johnson
- 06-25-18
Dense
While the material itself was good - but incredibly dense - I was eager to be *done* with the narration.
The early chapters made me feel like I was ill equipped to hear this book w/o an undergraduate degree in logic.
The narration was grating on my last nerve. In a book like this, the authors describe negation quite often. And someone narrating with a supremely proper Oxford English accent never says "at all," but more like "a toll." Tolls are paid on roads. They are not a linguistic negation. Pauses were just a bit too long and made the train of thought hard to follow (even on 1.25 speed). 14hrs of this ultra thick Oxford accent made yearn for just a smidge of some Murica Redneck narration.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-17-21
Fernando
Took me a while to finish. Incredibly fascinating. Would recommend to those interested in metacognition.
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- GATINEAU Jeremy
- 05-27-24
bro spittin fr fr
one of the clearest, and, fittingly, unbiased accounts of reason ive ever seen (although i may admittedly be displaying my-side bias by saying this); felt like a breath of fresh air, a great clarification among the other antiquated and patchwork views on Reason that are so prevalent in most if not all fields of science and common understanding
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- Log Jammin
- 12-11-17
reason is flawed but purposefully so
the authors make a solid case for the bias and laziness of reason to have evolved with the purpose of homo sapiens need to argue and defend their actions to others. since homo sapiens live in a highly social environment, reason should be considered another of the items in the toolbox that led to large-scale organization. beyond that, the authors convincingly portray reason as largely misunderstood and place it in its proper evolutionary perspective.
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30 people found this helpful
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- A. Sal
- 04-13-18
The case for Reason as an evolved module
I liked the depth the book gives to different psychological studies about how humans reason. How it explains reasoning with comparisons and it’s possible evolutionary path.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to understand why we can disagree even when undeniable facts are shown to us.
I gave it a 4 star rating because the first half of the book had what seemed to me as a complicated background. Necessary though, but a bit difficult for me maybe because I’m an engineer an not a psychologist. But after the foundations are laid, the books walks and guides you through the reasoning path with ease, while being very entertaining. the
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10 people found this helpful