Mind, Rationality, and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Debate

This paper features an interdisciplinary debate and dialogue about the nature of mind, perception, and rationality. Scholars from a range of disciplines — cognitive science, applied and experimental psychology, behavioral economics, biology and physiology — offer critiques and commentaries of a target article by Felin, Koenderink and Krueger (2017), “Rationality, perception, and the all-seeing eye,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. The commentaries raise a number of criticisms and issues about rationality and the all-seeing eye argument, including: the nature of judgment and reasoning, biases versus heuristics, organism-environment relations, perception and situational construal, equilibrium analysis in economics, efficient markets, and the nature of empirical observation and the scientific method. The debated topics have far-reaching consequences for the rationality literature specifically and the cognitive, psychological and economic sciences more broadly. The commentaries are followed by a response by the authors of the target article. The response is organized around three central issues: 1) the problem of cues, 2) what is the question? and 3) equilibria, $500 bills, and the axioms of rationality.