How Rational are Our Fallacies?: Philosophical Examination on Wason’s Selection Task

Miyoung Park

doi:10.22901/trans.2019.12.1.33

People often make judgements and actions in violation of the logical rules, and those judgements and actions have been generally regarded as irrational. The Wason’s selection task designed by Wason, P. C. in 1966 is the representative psychological experiment revealing the ubiquity of these fallacy-judgements. The result of the experiment was interpreted as ‘People often make an error by the lack of learning or will.’ This explanation offers a hypothesis for irrational judgements and actions, but does not offer any satisfying explanation about why the phenomenon is widespread and why it shows some regular pattern. An alternative is a theory that “irrational” judgements and actions are heuristics as an inference rule, not a fallacy. This theory provides more compelling explanation and predictability than the existing interpretation. Unfortunately, however, it still cannot offer any consistent and convincing argument due to its limitations with respect to irrationality. Understanding judgements and actions violating logical rules not as fallacy but as heuristics and accurately explaining and predicting how the mind works requires an explanation based on context-dependent, domain-specific rationality rather than one based on ideal rationality. This paper will show the followings: (1) Answers to the Wason’s selection task are not fallacy but judgements following heuristics as an inference rule. (2) Heuristics, different to logical rules, can function as norms of judgements. (3) Therefore, the best interpretation of heuristics working on the Wason’s selection task is not an interpretation postulating only logical rules and probabilistic rules as rational norms, but an interpretation based on context-dependent, domain-specific 탈경계인문학TRANS-HUMANITIES 64 rationality norms. If the above arguments are proper, we can say that people who make a typical wrong answer to the Wason’s selection task do not commit an irrational fallacy but make a rational inference adequate to situations and contexts that they are in. Furthermore, it might be highly justified that a number of common fallacies in a daily life are heuristics based on bounded rationality.

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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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