Having introduced rationality as a universal trait in his opening vignette on how San hunters assess the probability that partial prints belong to one animal rather than another, Pinker defines it as “a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.” Everyone has rationality everyone uses it.
(Pinker admits as much when he advocates for those of the “Rationality Community,” for whose membership he refers readers, in a footnote, to a 2017 blog post on .)Ī casual reader might be forgiven for missing this paradox. It means choosing some values and imposing some goals.
Solving the problem of “irrationality,” then, takes more than spreading the gospel of zweckrational.
This creates a recurring dissonance, since what is irrational (or “cockamamie,” or “stupid”) from his perspective often turns out to be eminently rational by his initial definition: That is, it serves the purposes of those who hold to it effectively. Rather than argue for his own liberal, technocratic goals, however, Pinker lets their presumed superiority color his use of “rational” and “irrational” throughout. If we are headed in the wrong direction, our mode of transportation may not be the only problem. Yet the desire to give reason a social or political assist is inescapable, because it is rooted in a paradox Pinker notes from the start, then selectively ignores: Rationality, as Rationality defines it, is an instrumental quality. If this sounds pessimistic for the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and pushy for the author of Enlightenment Now, Pinker does write that “we can no more impose values from the top down than we can dictate any cultural change.” Hell, we can’t even “implement a fallacy tax”-a joke, with a strong whiff of wishful thinking behind it. In a world that distorts, withholds, or floods us with data, he writes, making rational choices hard and bad choices rational, we reasoners must sometimes be cajoled, pressured, and constrained by friends, employers, and governments to make the right choices. Beyond offering tools to think with, Rationality periodically hints at more pointed interventions, even a kind of what the author calls at one point “social contract,” as a further step. Revealingly, Pinker himself shows signs of doubt.
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