Nothing new under the sun, or the moon, or both

The investigation of the mechanisms and principles of human reasoning is as ancient as the history of philosophy. It has always been clear that there is something special that allows humans, to a greater degree than other animals, to think about future states, make plans, have rational discussions, handle complex social situations, and invent marvelous things such as science. What this " something " was, however, has remained buried in mystery, and it still partially is. At the same time, demonstrations of human rationality have always been countered by staggering examples of bad reasoning, in history, in psychology, and, as many people (not us) will admit, in personal experience. The camp of psychologists and philosophers has thus been divided among those who were more impressed by the successes of humans against nature The latter group has argued that developing a theory of rational/logical reasoning is doomed because there is no object to study. The former group has tried to explain the (admittedly limited) rationality of the mind by developing theories of the mental representations and processes involved in deductive, causal, or probabilistic reasoning Recently, a way to reconcile the angelic and the demoniac aspects of human reasoning has taken the form of a single theory, the Dual System theory. As its name says, it replaces two alternative theories with one single theory which postulates two alternative subsystems. One may get the impression that the Dual System theory amounts to a mere reshuffling of the problems it was supposed to address, however, some of its claims may make it more than a simple trick of cards. The theory holds that one of the two systems is evolutionarily ancient, implicit, fast, mostly geared to track statistical regularities, whereas the second system is explicit, slow, effortful, error-prone, evolutionarily more recent, and perform abstract and logical reasoning. It is the characteristics of this second system that explain human errors with logical or complex probabilistic problems. Merge Bayesianism to this theory and you get what Oaksford calls the " New Paradigm, " which, he writes, is " based on Bayesian probability and dual processes " (Oaksford, 2015). Not only does the New Paradigm offer a novel theoretical framework to advance our knowledge of human reasoning, but it also offer " an alternative theoretical framework to those typically assumed in imaging research on deductive reasoning. " We cannot feel the same enthusiasm. First, it seems to …