From the Individual to the Social

Abstract

This chapter focuses on social factors in cognition. There is a puzzle about the human capacity to reflect on our beliefs. As argued in Chapter 4, this capacity, when exercised privately, does not make our belief acquisition more reliable. If we assume, however, that this capacity was selected for by evolution, like other features of the human body and human mind, then the question arises as to what it was selected for. This chapter focuses on a hypothesis due to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: that our capacity to reflect was selected for its role in cooperative activity. The upshot of this hypothesis, if it should prove correct, is that reflection does indeed contribute to greater reliability in belief acquisition, but only when it is used in cooperative problem-solving rather than private reflection.