Strategic Reflectivism In Intelligent Systems
Abstract
By late 20th century, the rationality wars had launched debates about the nature and norms of intuitive and reflective thinking. Those debates drew from mid-20th century ideas such as bounded rationality, which challenged more idealized notions of rationality observed since the 19th century. Now that 21st century cognitive scientists are applying the resulting dual pro-cess theories to artificial intelligence, it is time to dust off some lessons from this history. So this paper synthesizes old ideas with recent results from experiments on humans and machines. The result is Strategic Reflec-tivism, the position that one key to intelligent systems (human or artificial) is pragmatic switching between intuitive and reflective inference to opti-mally fulfill competing goals. Strategic Reflectivism builds on American Pragmatism, transcends superficial indicators of reflective thinking such as model size or chains of thought, applies to both individual and collective intelligence systems (including human-AI teams), and becomes increasingly actionable as we learn more about the value of intuition and reflection.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.22987,
title = {Strategic Reflectivism In Intelligent Systems},
author = {Nick Byrd},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.22987},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 4th International conference on Human and Artificial Rationality, which are to appear in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. An earlier version was presented at the 2025 ACM Workshop on Human-AI Interaction for Augmented Reasoning (CHI25-WS-AUGMENTED-REASONING)