Cognitive Fanaticism
A dogmatic commitment to cognitive science as the sole or superior framework for understanding mind, behavior, and society. The cognitive fanatic treats everything—from economic behavior to political preferences to artistic taste—as products of cognitive biases, heuristics, or information‑processing mechanisms, while ignoring historical, cultural, and structural factors. This stance often appears in rationalist communities, where any deviation from “optimal” cognition is pathologized. Cognitive fanaticism reduces human beings to information processors and dismisses interpretive, phenomenological, or social accounts as “unscientific.”
Example: “He explained political polarization solely through ‘confirmation bias’ and never mentioned media ownership or economic inequality—cognitive fanaticism, mistaking a partial mechanism for the whole story.”
Cognitive Fanaticism by Abzugal May 2, 2026
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