Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

More From Mary Poppins

“What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d.
—Hamlet”


This epigraph from Shakespeare, which Pinker uses to preface his latest book, summarises his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue he addresses. For Pinker, Shakespeare seems to be saying ‘if you got it flaunt it.’ ‘It’ being “such large discourse,” that is to say, language, which is indeed “godlike” and itself amounts to “reason.” Indeed we are a species able, no compelled, to use language in order to survive. The luxuries of sleeping and eating depend upon our effective use of it. However Shakespeare’s irony as a writer forced to make his way in life through language is obvious. But not to Pinker. Rationality is not scarce; it exists in an over-abundance. It may yet kill us all if we keep treating it as the divine solution to our ills.

Let me start by agreeing with Pinker: no human being is irrational, not even the most psychotic or criminal mind is without rationality. We all have what to us are good reasons for doing whatever we do. Or we are at least capable of formulating such reasons after the fact with conviction and assurance. The fact that others may not accept either our premises or our deductions does not make us irrational; it makes us wrong.

But Pinker doesn’t follow his own logic. This makes him contradictory, a good sign that what he’s peddling should be wrong for all of us. He thinks that he knows what he calls “the benchmarks of rationality” that should be the goal of education and the standards by which we judge what we hear and read, and presumably what we say and write. The benchmarks he has in mind are largely statistical and don’t address the core issue of rationality at all.

Whenever anyone starts an argument with ‘there are only two options to consider,’ be on the lookout for the garden path to reasoned stupidity. Pinker’s dichotomy of choice is that there are, “two modes of believing: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.” No prizes for guessing which one Pinker is going to promote. But what he actually does is subtly shift the subject with this linguistic tactic from rationality to reality. And since reality must be superior to myth, it will define the rational.

The problem of course is that Pinker has no idea what he means by reality. Or, better said, the ambiguity of reality is just what he needs in order to hide his contradictions - from himself as well as his readers. Without the touchstone of reality his subsequent argument is vacuous. What he is actually appealing to is some quasi-religious need in himself for stability or fixedness in how the uncontrollable beast of Language can be tamed, or at least contained within safe boundaries. He makes this need clear and wants us all to share in his anxiety: “In an era in which rationality seems both more threatened and more essential than ever, Rationality is, above all, an affirmation of rationality.”

Indeed, just as faith is an affirmation of faith. Pinker wants us to restore our faith in language and its ability to track with this thing called reality. Some words, he wants us to know, are closer to reality than other words. These latter are the words we should use to judge other words. How do we spot such words? Here is another proposition with which I agree wholeheartedly: “… none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”

So there is the central contradiction which Pinker tries to navigate around throughout his argument. Reality, he contends, is outside of language and defines rationality. But no, he also contends, rationality is what other language users determine to be rational. One has to ask of course: who are these other language users? What makes their opinions privileged? How are disagreement between groups to be resolved? In short, which group is to be considered dominant in the matter of language accuracy?

Pinker knows that what constitutes rationality depends on the circumstances. For him rationality is “… a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.” Yet another point on which we agree. The bushmen of the Kalahari employ a rationality that would not assist survival on the streets of Manhattan. What we take for scientific method and logic today is not what was accepted a century ago, nor will it be that which is accepted a century hence. The evolution of rationality itself is a fact that Pinker doesn’t deny. And yet he insists there is such a thing that is established in an unchanging Platonic realm of ideas.

Pinker makes a distinction between “the rational pursuit of goals… [and] an objective understanding of the world.” In this he engages in yet another self-contradiction. What he means by ‘objective’ apparently is the result of investigation by a totally disinterested observer. But if such an observer has no interest in a situation or condition, what prompted him or her to investigate in the first place? It is a basic principle of science that no effort is made without a reason, a question, a puzzle, a doubt. To engage in such an effort would be not just unreasonable but impossible. Yet Pinker thinks there is such a person, probably nesting comfortably among the other Platonic figures in a philosophical heaven of stability and without language.

Pinker spends a great deal of time on cute logical paradoxes. These are largely irrelevant to the core problem of rationality, which is the reasons for doing things not the errors we might make in acting on those reasons. Our choice of reasons, even if the reasons are only articulated after our actions in order to literally rationalise them, is an event that by definition cannot be reasonable. But that choice is what then determines the constitution of that which we casually call a fact. Once again: there are no objective facts; such things are self-contradictory. The only real issue of rationality is reasons.

For example: The expressed reason for the Holocaust was the need to rid the world of a harmful ideology of mutual responsibility that was invented and preserved by Jews. The official reason for the European invasion of the Americas was the promulgation of the true faith necessary for salvation. The reason for the existence of the CIA is the protection of American interests abroad at any political or cost to the rest of the world. Hegel demonstrated the rationality of these reasons dialectically; just as Kant with utmost rationality put paid to the idea that facts could undermine the reasons we promote.

Pinker has absolutely nothing to say about these sorts of reasons, except that they might be rejected if they had been discussed and debated openly. And perhaps not even then since it depends on who is doing the discussing. The matter is entirely political. Like it or not, morality, like facts, is a political matter. Pinker’s call for critical thinking is nothing more than a suggestion towards scepticism about established mores and rationality. So once again he contradicts himself. The crowd can be wrong after all. They may have missed a fallacy but they’re sticking with it. For them no fallacy exists; they just started with different reasons.

The bottom line is that while there are words that are better than other words for getting on in the world, we don’t know what they are from moment to moment. The words we use today may prove to be the cause of tomorrow’s destruction; but we have no way of assessing this either. Pinker is right to suggest that all we have is each other in the search for the right words. But we have no idea how to organise that search much less know when it is successful. We are at the mercy of this thing we presume to control - language. And Pinker, as he does in everything he writes, refuses to get that this is our predicament. What he provides is not Shakespearean insight but a diverting musical comedy. A gentle Mary Poppins, perhaps, come down from above to assure us children that the universe is benign and that Trump is a temporary aberration. How comforting.☂️

Postscript 30/09/21: for more on the same topic, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript 23/10/21: An example of the very irrational state of scientific rationality: https://apple.news/AA27bMZ17QuCqAo51e...

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