Scholarship and debugging cognitive illusions Scholarship and debugging cognitive illusions John R. Skoyles . Homepage Human reason is well established by psychologists to be bugged. Bugged to see patterns in random phenomena whether it be ink blots, stars in the night's sky or chance events. The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology has reported over the years a good many papers upon these cognitive illusions that bug our best effects at reasoning.
Scholarship is thus the science of debugging cognitive illusions from reasoning.
This debugging is very much parallel to the debugging done by software programmers. They know that in every hundred lines of code they write will be the odd mistake so they write to make them easy to spot and then test them in ways to bring out any bugs an early stage before they do any harm. It fulls one with a sense of mastery, a quick fix of certainty and the reassurance of an orientation in a world that can otherwise be so confusing. The debugging needed to be a scholar is hard work, full of disappointment and a constant dragging of ones eyes to the vastness of things we do not understand. Thus quackisms do not die when shown to be nonsense by scholarship.