233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.

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Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Binescape Podcast.
0:02.6	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.6	Human beings have a capacity for reasoning.
0:08.1	And I don't mean that in contrast with other animals or anything like that, at least not
0:12.1	right now.
0:13.1	We're not trying to figure out where we stand and the evolution of life or the hierarchy
0:17.8	or anything like that.
0:18.8	But some of us like to think that we can actually reason about things sometimes.
0:24.6	I don't even mean rationality.
0:26.6	So rationality is sort of a particular kind of reason.
0:28.8	There's different ways in which we reason about the world.
0:32.3	So where did that capacity come from?
0:35.0	What is it?
0:36.0	How does it work?
0:37.0	How do we make it better?
0:38.0	This is something we've talked about on the podcast before.
0:40.5	And it's a topic of great current interest.
0:43.1	People falling prey to misinformation, to cognitive biases, to conspiracy theories and
0:48.7	so forth.
0:49.7	How does all that work at a deep cognitive science level?
0:53.0	So today's guest, Hugo Mercier, is a French cognitive scientist.
0:57.9	He's done a lot of work and he's written two wonderful books that I can highly recommend.
	...

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