Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We human beings like to

flatter ourselves, perhaps, by thinking of ourselves as rational creatures. We all know that we're not

always rational. There's a whole little subculture of rationalists trying to convince us to

become more rational. There are debates in economics about

how rational actors really are and whether or not we can take irrationality into account or

whether or not we should just generalize our notion of rationality, et cetera. But it's an old

conceit that what distinguishes human beings from other kinds of animals or even other living

beings is our rationality. There's a motto that man is a rational animal that is supposed

to reflect an Aristotelian way of thinking. Aristotle himself didn't say quite those words,

but he basically said things like that, and it became kind of a catchphrase, right?

You know, other animals, there's a little bit of thinking involved, you know, some puzzle solving here and there,

but we human beings, we're really the rational ones.

One thing that follows from this perspective, even if you understand all the caveats and all the irrationalities,

et cetera, it kind of puts the spotlight on our brains, or at least our inner thoughts, right?

We human beings think, whether it's rationally or not, but we cogitate, et cetera,

and then we go out into the world, right? We interact with our environment, we interact with other people and social situations, et cetera. And that's a

hidden assumption that is worth interrogating. Today's guest, Philip Pettit, is a distinguished

philosopher, one of our most distinguished living philosophers at Princeton University and also

Australian National University, so he splits his time. And one of our most distinguished living philosophers at Princeton University and also Australian National University, so he splits his time.

And one of his themes throughout his work is sort of inverting that hidden assumption to say, you know, let's first think about the social world.

Let's first think about how human beings interact with each other,

and then ask how our thinking, how our reasoning, how our cogitation, our rationality,

...