What the pandemic showed us about reason and values

The pandemic has offered to many the jarring experience that one’s epistemic peers, whom we had previously perceived as very similar, may come to wholly different views about numerous aspects of the pandemic – from its severity to the efficacy of lockdowns or the safety of vaccines. This chapter considers how and why conditions of radical uncertainty, which characterised much of our experience during the pandemic, afford such divergence. It is argued that this is not merely a special case but rather reveals fundamental aspects of human reasoning that are more difficult to detect in familiar contexts but are nevertheless always present. Considering these underlying drivers of reasoning reveals, from a cognitive science perspective, an important way in which thinking cannot be neutral but rather is necessarily embedded in the wider network of beliefs and values we possess as individuals.