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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: A monopoly on rationality
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Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
A perfectly rational person is one who always has a good reason for what he does. Each step taken can be shown to be the best way to get to a well defined goal.
I am profoundly impressed with how the word "rational" gets hijacked to refer to a very narrow, very specific conception of rationality - the Cartesian conception, broadly. This hijacking comes out in places like the title of this paper and the above quote.
What we do is "rational" to the extent that it is based on real-world data (as opposed to wish fulfillment, living in our dreams) and pragmatically useful models of how the world works (as opposed to linear-reasoning, "A causes B" simplifications, unless of course these happen to be appropriate). "Rational" does not have to mean sticking to Cartesian precepts.
As used in the above quote, "rational" is synonymous with "armed with full, atomic and prioritized knowledge of particulars, systematically arranged in deductive patterns from observational data to conclusions". This is so rarely the case, but a lot more tractable mathematically than the usual situation of bounded rationality.
Humand minds have peculiar limitations. Some of these limitations result in obscure and messy processes such as intuition being more effective than the clearer, more pristine deductive reasoning. If we acknowledge these limitations, we will see that there need not be any "faking" involved in structuring our work along lines other than suggested by Descartes' precepts - that it is rational to acknowledge these limitations. Descartes did not have a monopoly on rationality.
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