RATIONALITY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE RATIONALITY

Human beings are not and cannot be intrinsically rational. Here's why.


Every human being walks around with a personalized understanding of the world, cognitively constructed and then internalized over time, that is vast, analogically extensive, conceptually hazy, incomplete, and not strictly bound by the limits of classical rationality (which, it turns out, is only a special case of the larger and more general cognitive logic: think of rational and irrational numbers sharing space on the mathematician’s number line, only in more dimensions, and you’ll have the general idea). I’ll flesh out the specifics in another piece.

This is strike one against the baseline assumption of rationality. The mental architecture just doesn’t fit.

Everybody also walks around with a profoundly limited attention span, from a cognitive processing standpoint, that prevents us from being fully conscious of more than a tiny fraction of this understanding at once.

This is strike two against the assumption of rationality. Omniscience is unavailable.

So, without even having gotten into the complex effects of emotion—strike three, and the eventual heart of this series—we can already stick a fork in classical rationality as a default mode of operation for human beings, because rationality requires unambiguous domain limits to function properly (all the relevant data, and only the relevant data) and all human decisions are influenced by active volumes of analogically cross-threaded experiences that, like icebergs, cannot help but remain almost entirely below the waterline of consciousness.

Note that I am not claiming that people cannot make rational arguments, just that they are universally incapable of making rational decisions.

The distinction is important. Science, philosophy, and other systemic interrogations of the world advance our understanding by relying upon rational arguments. Arguments are powerful because they are constructed from information that is both bounded and verifiable, meaning that their internal logic can be tested philosophically, a priori, in accordance with the rules of rationality. Consistency carries no guarantee of success—science routinely eviscerates huge numbers of logically valid arguments, proving them experimentally false and incrementally advancing human understanding—but consistency is a necessary precondition if meaningful scientific testing (whether of the professional or back yard tinkering sort) is to take place. Internal structure matters.

By contrast, human decisions are made “inside the head” using information that is bounded but not verifiable, even in principle, given the logical interplay of conceptual architecture, analogical cross-threading, and attentional limits. This is especially true of the personal decision to accept/adopt any given rational argument, without which its rationality will find no purchase. The decision to do so is often mistaken for evidence of intrinsic rationality itself, when in fact it is evidence of just the opposite: without the rigorous mental training needed to achieve a degree of logical fluency, and without a cultivated interest in doing so, that “rational” reaction is easily swamped by other informational and emotional considerations that are supplied by the wider cognitive logic. Once again, internal structure matters.

To sum up, several points:

1) The world yields up its secrets to sustained rational inquiry, but humans are not and cannot be intrinsically rational beings;

2) While humans are capable of exercising rationality in limited domains through the power of rational argument, and while we can decide to act in accordance with those rational guidelines, the decision to do so is not and cannot ever be rational (although it is likely to be pragmatic);

3) Criticizing your opponents for being irrational is therefore exactly as meaningless as criticizing them for breathing (a point that provides a nicely barbed defense against airs of superiority);

4) Criticizing their arguments is always fair game.

A corollary:

The widespread existence of a deeper layer of decision-making logic is triply confirmed by the conspicuous absence of rational argument from political and other effective mass market advertising, by the structural conformity of the current appeals that are being used, and by the enormous amounts of money poured into constructing them.

An aphorism or two:

“Humans can make rational arguments, but never rational decisions.”

“There are no rational people, there are only rational arguments.”

A handful of policy recommendations:

1) It is terribly important to teach rationality in schools, precisely because it is not an innate function, and because it is our only reliable means of interrogating the world;

2) It is equally important to teach that rationality is not innate (especially your own!), but is rather a special case within a much wider and wilder suite of cognitive operations whose influence cannot be turned off;

3) Emphasizing pure human rationality over the wider cognitive logic, rather than placing it in its proper context, is not only guaranteed not to solve persistent human problems, it will in fact make them worse.

And finally, a short restatement of purpose:

ILLUMINATING THAT WIDER CONTEXT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS DEVELOPING SERIES.


Update (11/13/13): A second post, Oh, Humanity! Three Recalibrations of “Rational Self-Interest” is now available. It introduces the second type of irrationality (emotional) and touches on how both kinds interact to shape our politics.