New Paper on Ecological Rationality and Critical Thinking

My latest paper, entitled “Steering into the Skid: On the Norms of Critical Thinking” has just been published in Informal Logic. You can find it here.

In the paper I look at the implications of arguments from Gigerenzer and Mercier & Sperber that cognitive heuristics and biases are ecologically rational, that is, that they are rational when used under the right conditions. This might be taken as a challenge to teaching critical thinking skills, as such as skills may not match the reasoning success of our informal heuristics. I argue that a sophisticated conception of the goals of critical thinking, namely, critical thinking as the metacognitive skill to recognize and implement the right cognitive strategies in the right circumstances, helps us to avoid this objection.

Comments and thoughts welcome!