ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, we have introduced our basic thesis that people’s reasoning and decision making help them to achieve their basic goals within cognitive constraints. Rationality1 is not an all or nothing matter: it comes in degrees. People will tend to be more rational in this sense in their practical thought about basic goals and sub-goals, than in their theoretical reasoning that is not directly related to practical goals. They will tend to be better at achieving their goals when they are relying on basic, preconscious processes, such as those that process visual information, than when relying on the explicit use of representations in their conscious reasoning, where their cognitive constraints can be serious. This view of rationality is the first of two basic theoretical foundations for the arguments advanced in this book. The second is that all human thought is highly subject to what we term relevance effects. For us this means that people reason only about a highly selective representation of problem information and prior knowledge, and that this selection is determined preconsciously. This idea connects with what some other authors in the field are describing as “focusing”, as we shall see.
