Reasoning in group and institutional contexts: A taxonomy

This essay aims to examine the forms of reasoning that are specific to collective (social and political) life. I offer them as a way of organizing the most general framework for navigating social life, more general even than norms or principles. I will advance a taxonomy of reasoning forms that emerge in group and institutional contexts, building on the four-models taxonomy of relations first articulated by anthropologist Alan Fiske (1991). My 2x2 taxonomy of reasoning maps readily onto Fiske’s taxonomy: it organizes Fiske’s models, as building blocks that structure social life across overlapping institutions and cultures. Finally, I will show that there is room in an account of reasoning for representing the sort of human freedom that is unavailable in certain moral psychologies (represented, for example by the work of Jonathan Haidt) and linguistic theories (Steven Pinker and George Lakoff). According to Haidt (2013), we are only conscious of our rationalisation processes, not of anything that is truly the basis of our moral or political judgements. According to Pinker (2007), the tools we use for reasoning – the cognitive models or analogies – are all too often frozen, subject neither to examination nor modification. But according to the account I shall articulate, we are conscious of our moral reasonings because they require intervening and interrupting (default) processes that would proceed, in many cases, below the level of consciousness, otherwise. The account on offer here shares the philosophical temperaments examplified by W. D. Ross and Friedrich Nietzsche.