The Allure and Cost of Adaptive Rationality

Scientific investigation suggests that subjects are prone to commit widespread and systematic reasoning errors, since their reasoning often departs from norms of first order logic, probability theory, and expected utility theory. However, according to a recent trend in the study of human rationality, based on the concept of “adaptive rationality”, departures from those norms should not be taken as instances of irrational behavior, but rather as the consequence of relying on too narrow, rigid and abstract normative standards. I reconstruct the normative challenge mounted by AR theorists, and argue that AR scholars are right when they claim that standard norms cannot be universal benchmarks of rationality. Yet, I also suggest that ARs claim that we should replace these norms with new standards of rationality seems to face important hurdles.