Prof. Thomas Sturm (ICREA & UAB, Barcelona)

In psychology, the notion of intuition is nowadays as popular as it is contested. For some psychologists, intuitions are fast and automatic cognitions which have to be explained in terms of (typically subconscious) rules of thumb called “heuristics” which lead to systematic and severe errors, and are thus contrasted to deliberate and valid reasoning. Others, in contrast, claim that intuitions can more often than not be relied upon, since they are based on reliable, “fast and frugal heuristics”. Proponents of these views have typically competing assessments of dual systems theories of reasoning. In discussing this debate, I first argue that while there is an empirical conflict between the two positions, there should not be a normative conflict between them. This claim has two aspects, a prescriptive, agent-related one, and an evaluative, theory-related one. On the one side, depending on what we know in advance about different areas of problem-solving, we agents should sometimes rely on intuitions and sometimes on more careful, deliberate reasoning processes. On the other side, our normative theories of good reasoning can and should integrate aspects of the standard and the bounded rationality approaches. Second, I consider when and how the demands of rationality can be realized in the face of the force of intuitive judgments, focusing here on reasoning about heated political debates.