Epistemic Normativity and Heuristic Structure of Reasoning

Abstract

Much research in the last decades has demonstrated that human reasoning tends to violate what have usually been regarded as the normative principles of reasoning —e.g. the principles of standard theory of probability or classical logic. These supposed violations have been interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. A notion of a reasoning norm different from that underlying such an interpretation allows me to assert that correct reasoning implies reasoning in accordance with rules designed to solve a limited class of problems in a specific domain of knowledge and which are not susceptible to being formulated in terms of general principles. This contention leads me to sustain that the heuristic structure of our reasoning signals the way in which we are rational.