Thoughts on rationality

The topic for this month's philosophy group is 'are we rational?' To me it seems obvious that the answer is no. But lets look at the question from a number of different perspectives.

There are many ways in which humans could be rational. We could have a part that is rational, as contrasted with emotional, appetitive and spiritual or willful parts. We could have the ability to reason correctly. We could behave in a predictable fashion to further our individual or collective goals, or some other goal. We might collectively have the ability and desire to come up with better rules for reasoning about things.

The ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) conceived of the soul as having different parts, including a rational part, and various bestial-appetitive parts, and perhaps a spirit or will as well. We could be rational by virtue of having a rational part. Kant considered that there was a structure to reason. It couldn't be made to account for morality and duty, but it did explain for him the interaction between a-priori knowledge and knowledge derived from experience, including the synthetic principles by which a-priori ideas are put together.

Experiments by Tversky, Kahneman and others since the 1970's show that even if we have a rational part, we are very bad at making reasonable decisions based on certain kinds of information. For example, we overestimate the likelihood of conjunctions (two things happening together at once are never as likely as each one singly), we ignore base rates (the probability of somebody having, say, a deadly disease, based on the results of a screening test, depends on how prevalent the disease is in the first place), and we give false significance to illusory conjuctions (which accounts for part of the fascination of 25 random things and the like on facebook). In fact this is hardly surprising, given how long it took historically for humans to discover how to reason correctly based on probabilities - the thousands of years between the invention of language and money, and the theorems of Laplace and Bayes were likely filled with people losing out on bad bets. Those who gained were probably just lucky. Gigerenzer showed that when the information is presented differently in these experiments people will sometimes make the right decision, but this just begs the question - why have a commonplace way of presenting the information that leads to errors? And why don't people learn? Gigerenzer argues that human reasoning is ecologically valid because we have only a limited capacity to process information, and our survival dictates that we come up with decisions in the nick of time.

Economists like to think that people act to further their selfish goals, because this makes marketplace behavior predictable. Many studies show that this is not so. People favor egalitarianism (fairness) and punish cheating behavior even at personal cost.

Ed Stein argues in his book Without Good Reason that we should not jump to the conclusion that people are irrational, that this is an empirical question but the jury is out. He favors a naturalist epistemology (theory of knowledge) which is based on a mix of descriptions of people's beliefs and norms of how one should believe (reminiscent of Kant). Perhaps the errors people make in these cognitive experiments could be overcome by sufficient education. Bartley argues that we can be rational if we hold all our beliefs subject to logical and empirical criticism. Quine describes human knowledge as a web in which the outer, peripheral beliefs are subject to contrary evidence whereas the central ones are less so, but can move historically out - such as the belief that the sun circles around the earth.

I wonder if our belief that there is a rational part to the soul will shift far enough out that it can be abandoned, and what would be the effect of this. On the whole I think people's behavior is largely predictable and irrational, accounted for by a basic herd instinct compounded with various cultural traditions.

If we are irrational, the question 'are we rational?' becomes somewhat inaccessible, because we could never show that our beliefs about this were rationally based. However, assuming (or defining) that we are are rational would lead to obvious errors in predicting human behavior and beliefs, unless we decide that we are rational in exactly the ways we do behave and believe which would negate the purpose of using the word rational in the first place.

There is a difference between predicting human behavior and explaining or understanding it. Everyone seems to have a central belief about the structure of the soul, and most of these beliefs are culturally based, whether they come from Greek philosophy, various religions, or from Freud. This seems to be a class of belief which people hold subject to neither empirical nor logical criticism. It often includes impenetrable elements such as the unconscious or subconscious, the spirit, free will, consciousness, or even thought and reason itself.

I definitely see historical progress in our ability to make logical (rational) inferences concerning things like probability and in conditions of complexity where our basic intuitions are wrong. This progress is a cultural artifact that necessitates the existence of two things in my worldview. First, that some ways of reasoning are objectively better than others. Second, that humans have the potential capacity, given the right education, to see this. While I would dispute the contention that some people are more rational than others, I believe that historically some societies have had more knowledge about reasoning than others, and the collective ability to make more reasoned decisions and hold more reasonable beliefs, or at least to logically criticize false beliefs and wrong decisions.