ABSTRACT
Ecological approaches to human cognition emphasize that reasoning and decision making cannot be understood in isolation of our practical reality; however, often it is not emphasized enough how that reality is largely socially constituted. The classical rationalist model of the human is infamously defective, not necessarily because of the wrong rational analysis but because of looking for its implementation in the wrong place: in individual brains instead of intersubjective and distributed decision making. I discuss the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier & Sperber, 2011, 2017), which explains discursive reasoning as a communicative practice with a main function to assess the reliability of information provided by our peers, in combination with recent brain and behavioral studies corroborating ideas from social and linguistic pragmatism that highlight how joint reasoning has important social coordinative functions. This chapter suggests (1) reconsidering the relative importance of social and social psychological factors in comparison to traditional cognitive theory in argument acceptance and decision making in public and private reasoning, and (2) reconsidering what one wants to look for in the brain to uncover the cognitive basis of such judgments.
