RATIONALITY

Steven Pinker is one of my favourite author. I first read his book, The Blank Slate about 20 years ago, and till now already have a collection of his books such as Stuff of Thought and Enlightenment Now.

This is his latest book. According to him, rationality is a public good. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress.

“I've mentioned that successful institutions of rationality never depend on the brilliance of an individual, since not even the most rational among us is bias-free. Instead they have channels of feedback and knowledge aggregation that make the whole smarter than any of its parts. These include peer review in academia, testability in science, fact-checking and editing in journalism, checks and balances in governance, and adversarial proceedings in the judicial system.”

“Educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities, could make statistical and critical thinking a greater part of their curricula. Just as literacy and numeracy are given pride of place in schooling because they are a prerequisite to everything else, the tools of logic, probability, and causal inference run through every kind of human knowledge. Rationality should be the fourth R, together with reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

“Human reasoning has its fallacies, biases, and indulgence in mythology. But the ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and so irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software. It lies in the duality of self and other: our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view. The core of morality is impartiality: the reconciliation of our own selfish interests with others'. So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one.”