11.3. Costs and benefits
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Many naturalistically inclined philosophers have argued against epistemological
theories that require that people have brains ‘‘the size of a blimp’’
(in Stich’s memorable phrase [1990, 27]). But as far as we know, no philosopher
has explicitly proposed a cost-benefit approach to epistemology.
So where does the idea come from? The idea is deeply embedded in
psychology. Indeed, this book project received a withering review from a
psychologist who was incensed that we would bother wasting ink on the utterly trivial proposition that good reasoning involves the efficient allocation
of limited cognitive resources. Regardless of whether it is trivial, it is
certainly not an implicit tenet of the philosophical discipline charged with
the normative evaluation of cognition. It’s not that most analytic epistemologists
would deny the proposition, it’s just that they appear to have no
use for it in their theorizing. This is one more example—as if one more
were needed—of the yawning chasm that separates the discipline that
studies reasoning from the discipline that seeks to evaluate it.
Many naturalistically inclined philosophers have argued against epistemological
theories that require that people have brains ‘‘the size of a blimp’’
(in Stich’s memorable phrase [1990, 27]). But as far as we know, no philosopher
has explicitly proposed a cost-benefit approach to epistemology.
So where does the idea come from? The idea is deeply embedded in
psychology. Indeed, this book project received a withering review from a
psychologist who was incensed that we would bother wasting ink on the utterly trivial proposition that good reasoning involves the efficient allocation
of limited cognitive resources. Regardless of whether it is trivial, it is
certainly not an implicit tenet of the philosophical discipline charged with
the normative evaluation of cognition. It’s not that most analytic epistemologists
would deny the proposition, it’s just that they appear to have no
use for it in their theorizing. This is one more example—as if one more
were needed—of the yawning chasm that separates the discipline that
studies reasoning from the discipline that seeks to evaluate it.