Kahneman's Muddles: Consistency and Coherence
I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow . It is a very interesting book. When Kahneman is on his own ground, psychology, he seems to be a brilliant thinker. (Not being a psychologist, I feel the need to hedge this with a "seems to be": I'm really not qualified to judge!) I think he probably deserved the Nobel Prize he received. But as soon as Kahneman starts talking philosophy, he begins to make terrible errors: we might say he is suffering from the "illusion of understanding." Let us examine a few of these, starting with consistency and coherence . Kahneman litters his text with statement such as "we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see," or we "produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense." This is because "we are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world." At first glance, it might seem that this is just a psychological truth, something Kahneman ha...