Imposed Rationality and Besieged Imagination by Gustavo Pereira

Author:Gustavo Pereira
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030265205
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.4 Appropriation of the Tradition and Conceptualization

From these three ways of understanding social pathologies by some of the most prominent representatives of the Critical Theory we can present a series of points contributing to the articulation of a comprehensive conceptualization of social pathologies. In doing this, I intend to appropriate the legacy of the Critical Theory and its potential to criticize capitalism, and offer a sufficiently accurate explanation of the social processes that give rise to social pathologies, which will enable us to diagnose and formulate alternatives to the effects they produce on individuals and social life. At the same time, a question arises to complement and strengthen this perspective: which are the microfoundations that explain these processes? In other words, what cognitive processes arise when social pathologies occur? If we were facing a cognitive failure, what would be its relationship with the explanation provided by tradition? I argue that explaining this in terms of microfoundations is an innovative approach. In particular, my position aims to account for social pathologies as a cognitive failure that arises from the blockage of the exercise of imagination, and this is perfectly compatible with some explanations provided by cognitive psychology, particularly the one found in Tversky and Kahneman’s research (Kahneman et al. 1982). Although I will present it more thoroughly below, I would now like to focus on this direction.

Research carried out by Kahneman and Tversky, among others,10 distinguishes two ways in which our brain responds to the circumstances that we face: a fast and intuitive way, and a slow and reflective one. In most situations it is the intuitive processes that respond, but when coping with situations that require greater concentration and deliberate and reflective responses, our reflective processes are activated. That is why the reflective processes are said to be lazy,11 that is, they do not act by themselves but rather when it is required by our intuitive processes. The problem and the relevance of this for my work is that the intuitive processes suffer from biases and illusions, and as they do not perceive them as such, they do not bring the reflective processes into play. In this way, the cognitive failure that characterizes these processes is not conscious and can typically only be overcome by an external intervention that activates the reflective processes.

A particular case of these biases is the so-called “availability heuristic”, which is a cognitive response where we intuitively adopt the information or the explanatory logic that is available or we already control to account for what is required of us. In this way, insofar as the means-ends rationality prevails in most of the social reproduction spaces, and for that reason is easily available to individuals, it is understood as the type of practical rationality that can guide action in social spaces alien to this logic. Something similar might happen in social situations where moral rationality predominates, for example in a rigid religious context strongly articulated by moral values and beliefs. In these situations, it could be perfectly

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