RATIONALITY AND HUMAN REASONING

In studies of rationality there is a normative pr oject which seeks to comprehend what it means to reason correctly or to be rational. Such project focuses on finding rules capable of establishing standards aga inst which human reasoning can be measured. There is also a descriptive project pract iced by cognitive scientists using an empirical approach. These scientists want to discov er how people do in fact reason and describe the mechanisms and processes responsible f or the observed patterns in reasoning. This article will expose some historical aspects of each one of the projects and briefly introduce a recent approach from the de scriptive project with the power of proposing a new form of comprehending normative aspects, the dual process theories.