But my mental processes always feel honest to me. After all, isn’t changing our minds in response to new information and arguments what we’re supposed to do? What separates political opportunism from intellectual growth? Turns out the answer is: not much. We understand reasoning to be an individual act. This is, in many cases, wrong. “The central flaw in the concept of reason that animated the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that it is entirely individualistic,” writes philosopher Joseph Heath.12 But decades of research has proven that “reason is both decentralized and dispersed across
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