Challenging the rational choice theorist perspective Emotion, evolution and rationality. Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse (Eds.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. No. of pages 292. ISBN 0-19-852898-1. (paperback)

✍ Scribed by Thomas E. Dickins

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 42 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/acp.1096

✦ Synopsis

If one were to reflect on Human Reason as a reasoning human, it might appear wise to judge this faculty in terms of its successes and failures in the immediate realm of human-level problems. As a species we are confronted with situations on a day-to-day basis that require some thinking in order to reach a decision. Once a decision has been made and an appropriate action executed we could, under this scheme, lay claim to a well-judged solution or not, by referring to a normatively established set of aims and objectives. Making optimal use of resources to hand might then become the mark of rationality, and we might begin to talk of humans as rational choice theorists.

Regarding humans as this sort of rational chooser fails to provide any account of the design of Human Reason, let alone of its function. At best this perspective amounts to a natural historical account of human behaviour, at worst it might lead to explanations of certain behaviours as irrational and as sourced in some systemic error. To use an oft cited example, we might decide that a continued desire to eat high-fat foods is irrational in light of shared aims about health and longevity as well as knowledge about fat and cardiac disease. The person who, in receipt of this knowledge, continues to eat 'badly' is being irrational in the face of these judgements. But, this description fails to capture why the individual is eating like this and why information about diet fails to impact upon this person. Such a judgement of irrationality seems scientifically a little impotent. However, a theory of the design of Human Reason would remedy this and evolution through natural selection is the preeminent theory of design available to contemporary cognitive scientists. When looked at evolutionarily a desire for sweet, fatty foods makes good design sense for a species that has spent much of its ancestral past in environments where such high calorie foods were scarce. On encountering fatty food it would be adaptive to consume as much as possible and it looks like we are hardwired to do this. In this way, as Oliver Curry has commented (personal communication), evolution through natural selection operates like a rational choice theorist, optimizing organisms in the face of selection pressures, but this does not mean that natural selection has built a rational choice theorist. So, given the ready availability of fatty foods in modern society it is difficult to override our innate dispositions despite knowledge of its dangers.

Emotion, Evolution and Rationality contains 13 chapters devoted to unpacking the design of human reason and challenging the rational choice theorist perspective. The book is divided into four sections on: neuroscientific foundations; emotion, belief and appraisal; evolution and the rationality of emotion; and, philosophical perspectives. This breadth allows the book to discuss what emotions and rational behaviours might actually be as well as what their functional role is. This review shall discuss a few key contributions in order to emphasize this dual approach.

Evans advances the search hypothesis of emotion as a functional claim about emotions. The hypothesis notes that even simple decision making can present a vast search space of possible options for an organism and this in itself presents an intractable problem of weighing up all options before acting. Emotions might, however, play the role of limiting the amount of information an organism has to process as well as assigning 'a subjective utility to each possible outcome' (p. 181). So emotions act in an irrational way (by the standards of rational choice theory) to guide more deliberative cognitions to focus on a few essential options.

Evans' account is about function and he openly declares he has no theory of what emotions are. Nonetheless, he does briefly relate his theory to Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio details his thoughts on emotion in this book too, with a chapter re-examining William James' contribution). Here the idea is that emotions conjure up reactions to consider possible outcomes, and these reactions might be visceral responses. If these reactions are negative these outcomes are