BOOK REVIEW Emanuele Bardone: Seeking chances: from biased rationality to distributed cognition Cognitive Systems Monographs, Volume 13, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-19632-4, DOI: 10.1007/ 978-3-642-19633-1 Merja Bauters Published online: 22 June 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag 2012 The use of intuition and emotion in reasoning or in building hypothesis has been discussed through varied approaches within many disciplines. Emanuele Bar- done provides new insights into these issues, such as the idea of human cognition as a chance-seeking system. This perspective creates a new framework when considering the decision-making and problem solving challenges. One of the key concepts that Bardone discusses at length is affordances, the relation of affordances to abduction and to the eco-cognitive niche. Worth mentioning are also: niche construction and the notion of humans as ecological engineers. All these concepts use, and build upon, the idea of distributed cognition. Bardone guides the reader smoothly from the logical reasoning tradition towards his more appropriate formulation of human ‘‘social’’ reasoning and problem solving. He rightly points out the importance of fallacies and states these to be a particular kind of rationality, namely, biased rationality. He lists and explains the three types of well known fallacies: argumentum ad hominem (or argument against person), argumentum ad verecundiam (or appeal to authority), argumentum ad populum (or appeal to popularity or bandwagon) (2011: 7) and goes forward explaining how humans use these in every day practice to master problem solving situations that M. Bauters (&) Media Engineering, Helsinki University of Applied Sciences, Vanha maantie 6, 02650 Espoo, Finland e-mail: Merja.bauters@metropolia.fi; bauters@helsinki.fi M. Bauters Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Sammonkatu 8 C 42, 00100 Helsinki, Finland 123 Mind Soc (2012) 11:257–264 DOI 10.1007/s11299-012-0107-z