The power of reason

We do have reasons why we choose, and those reasons matter. We listen to evidence, we weigh arguments. We change our minds because of this, and when our minds change we make different choices.

All this is deeply unfashionable in world which sometimes seems to have fallen out of love with reasons. Our worship of science seems to portray us as machines, with little space for reasons among the spinning cogs of our physics or biology. And in public life the psychologists and marketing people lead a choir of voices proclaiming our irrationality and gullibility.

I want to persuade you that reason and argument are still alive, despite being maligned, and have always mattered to how we choose¹.

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To hear about how psychologists have over-hyped evidence of our irrationality, tweet @ChoiceEngine HYPED; direct link hyped

To think about our natural intuitions about freewill INTUITIONS; direct link intuitions

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1: I wrote an e-book about this topic called ‘For argument’s sake: evidence that reason can change minds’