Mind, Rationality, and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Debate

This article 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, and biology — offer critiques and commentaries of a target article by Felin, Koenderink, and Krueger: “Rationality, Perception, and the All-Seeing Eye,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. The commentaries raise a number of criticisms and issues concerning 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, as well as for the cognitive, psychological, and economic sciences more broadly. The commentaries are followed by a response from the authors of the target article. Their 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.