The world of those who study argument and who study reason and rationality is abuzz with talk of the provocative research of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. Anyone who was at last week’s OSSA conference heard their names in practically every other conversation or presentation. For my own part I’m not sure quite what to make of their work. On the one hand it’s exciting to see argument and reason brought together in empirical research, and I’m well on record as being very friendly to the notion that argument has a very deeply rooted functionality for human beings at both the collective and individual levels. On the other hand, I’m not sure that there aren’t grave problems lurking within. For one, Mercier and Sperber seem at times to work from the assumption that ‘argument’ means ‘deductive argument’ and if this is so, I’m not at all sure that it is wise. The body of work on analogy alone would give me pause regarding the prospects of such a view, to say nothing of the work of the informal logic movement in the last 30 years. There are other things that trouble me, but as I’m still doing research in this general idea I’ll try to save myself what might turn out to be a super-sized helping of crow and leave the reader to their own devices where Messrs. Mercier and Sperber are concerned.
At any rate there’s no denying it’s relevance to the world of argumentation theory. In that vein this video interview with Hugo Mercier is one that I expect will be of interest to many. The interview is located at the web journal* Edge, itself worth a look to those with an interest in interdisciplinary intellectual discourse.
*(All apologies to those of you who thought that by ‘Edge’ I was referring to an Irish fellow–though I confess I probably would have watched that interview with interest too.)
Dear Steve,
Thanks a lot for posting this here and for your kind words!
You say that “Mercier and Sperber seem at times to work from the assumption that ‘argument’ means ‘deductive argument’”
I don’t think we do, but I’d be curious to know what made you think that, we don’t want to be misleading anyone.
Cheers,
Hugo
Hi Hugo,
Thanks so much for the reply!
I suppose what gave me that impression was the prevalence of modus tollens used as an example in one of your papers (I wrote a post about it here on RAIL about a year ago). Of course it doesn’t help that prior to taking up that paper again I had been re-reading this one*, where that assumption is (I think) built into the framework of what the authors did in their study. As I say in the post I’m working through your papers and that was as far as I’d gotten among those I could find and to which I could get access and I’ve only really just begun. I’m positively thrilled to hear that my impression in that regard was off! Of course, I should have known better. 🙂
I’m quite sincere when I say that your work has everyone in the argumentation theory community, including myself, very excited. There was some talk that we might see Dan Sperber at OSSA this past week but I suppose that circumstances intervened and he was unable to make it. It’s really too bad, as he would have found a very receptive and enthusiastic audience.
Thanks again for your important work. Those of us interested in making sure that our philosophical theories about reasoning take seriously what we can learn from empirical studies about it are in your debt.
All the best,
Steve
*Note: I had previously had a link to this paper but the link has gone bad. For anyone interested the paper information is as follows: West, Stanovich, and Toplak, “Heuristics and Biases as Measures of Critical Thinking: Associations with Cognitive Ability and Thinking Dispositions”, Journal of Educational Psychology, 2008, Vol. 100, No. 4, 930–941.
Hi Steve,
Yes, I guess we use the modus tollens a lot, but that’s only convenience as it illustrates several of our points (within the psychology of reasoning an undue amount of research has been dedicated to deductive reasoning, so it’s bound to provide most of the examples, but that’s accidental).
Thanks again for your interest in our work! I’m sorry to hear Dan wasn’t able to make it to OSSA, I’m sure he would have gotten good feedback.
Best,
Hugo
Those following comments for this post may be interested in this new post concerning Mercier and Sperber’s work on the argument-based theory of reasoning: https://railct.com/2011/08/16/point-of-inquiry-interview-with-hugo-mercier/