2017 book The Enigma of Reason, makes coherent sense of the very aspects of human thought that have seemed so confounding: the fact that people are capable of stringently evaluating the validity of arguments, along with the fact that they so often fail to do so when the arguments are their own. Both tendencies are fully predicted by the authors’ “argumentative theory of reasoning.” We have every incentive to closely examine the arguments of others—who might be out to exploit or manipulate us for their own ends—but few inducements to scrutinize the arguments we make ourselves.
