Abstracts

New Philosophical Underpinnings for Ecological Rationality

Patricia Rich University of Bristol

The relatively new concept of “ecological rationality,” put forward by psychologists, defines rationality as the degree to which a cognitive process can be expected to perform well given the environment in which it is used [4, 5]. The developers of ecological rationality claim that it captures both descriptive and normative rationality, i.e. that it accurately identifies the essence of human rationality and that people ought use more ecologically rational processes. Ecological rationality is generally taken – including by its proponents – to depart sharply from philosophical tradition: Traditional norms of rationality (such as axioms of logic or rational choice) are explicitly rejected. Intuitions about rationality are so strongly influenced by intuitions about what merits praise or blame that ecological rationality has been rejected as oxymoronic, because people do not deserve praise for success achieved by the unconscious use of evolved heuristics.

In contradistinction to this view, I argue that ecological rationality is less of a departure with tradition than is generally recognized. Specifically, I portray ecological rationality as a natural culmination of a long philosophical tradition, taking advantage of today's privileged position of scientific knowledge. In describing this tradition, I will highlight the conceptions of rationality of Aristotle, Cicero, Robert Nozick, and Philip Kitcher. After explaining how many essential features of ecological rationality are shared by these philosophers' accounts, I will point to a feature of those historic views – holism – which proponents of ecological rationality could embrace in order to strengthen their position.

Aristotle is the first and perhaps most important person in the intellectual lineage that I trace; he takes rationality to be both descriptive (the defining feature of humans) and normative (we ought harness our capacities in the service of our ends). In his view these aspects are de-coupled in that there is no inference from normative shortcomings to descriptive irrationality; this de-coupling is also a feature of ecological rationality, but it is a subtle feature that critics miss. On such a view, it is natural to see normative rationality as comparative (this is better than that); this is reflected in both Aristotle's philosophy and in ecological rationality.

I will point out that Cicero reflects this same basic picture (rather than Plato's, as we might have imagined) [3], and explain how Nozick's philosophy of rationality [7] can be naturally interpreted as an updating of Aristotle based on our knowledge of natural selection and human evolution, which nonetheless retains the features noted above. While I won't characterize Kitcher as Aristotelian, the naturalized epistemology that he advocates fits comfortably with the other views [6]; importantly, his emphasis on practical improvements to rationality and understanding its workings in humans provide strong support for ecological rationality.

I will close with a helpful suggestion stemming from the observation that ecological rationality has tended to focus narrowly on particular problems, while the philosophical tradition sees rationality as a feature of agents as a whole, emphasizing their broader lives. Including a holistic perspective in their arguments would serve ecological rationality well, for example by accommodating Wallin and Gärdenfors' concern about how heuristics are matched to contexts [8] and helping to explain why people should not be seen as irrational by virtue of our many well-known perceived cognitive failings.