Can we learn to be more rational? It’s hardly an idle question, although in posing it I feel compelled – in the name of reason – to add some immediate qualifications and caveats before trying to suggest an answer.
One such caveat is that there are two kinds of rationality (broadly speaking), the practical and the intellectual. They relate and even overlap, but they are distinct, and we are talking here about the intellectual kind of rationality: the following of rules and reasons in order to think and communicate better.
In short: practical rationality is about acting efficiently toward ends. Intellectual rationality is about thinking and communicating efficiently, both of which involve (with important but limited exceptions) the use of language.
Which leads us directly to the second caveat: rationality in both senses is a means, not an end in itself. It is a necessary means to some things (learning, scholarship, democratic citizenship) but still a means, not an end. And it does a complicated dance with things we think of as irrational or at least extra-rational, such as imagination, intuition, spontaneity, creativity, and (not least) emotion.
I would argue that all of these have a rational component – and indeed, that consciousness of any kind requires a baseline of rational sorting of the world, of making explicit the unconscious work we do in order to identify and individuate objects, properties, events, and so forth. A lot of that reasoning goes on below-decks, as it were, in our unconscious and in our dreams. That’s why the best ideas I have are the ones I wake up with.
A final caveat is that we are fundamentally rational (as well as irrational and non-rational) creatures. Reasoning doesn’t begin with formal education; but formal education can, and should, make us more rational, not in the sense of blunting our imagination or emotions or intuitions, or putting rationality on a pedestal where it doesn’t belong, but in the sense of being more aware of and familiar with the tools and skills that comprise robust rational thinking.
But never mind all that for now.
Let’s just start with the two caveats: rationality is about thinking and communicating, and it’s a means not an end. Put another way, it’s a form of community – just as language is a form of community, and citizenship is a form of community. They are overlapping (or in the voguish academic phrase, intercalated) forms of community. All they do is get us on the same page, without erasing our differences as separate beings who want or need to get along in the world with other beings.
When we talk or reason together, we are sharing an infinitesimal part of our conscious thinking, imperfectly; but it beats the alternative. Language is full of embedded rationality (as well as possibilities for departing from it, through poetry, political demagogy, etc.). But even those ways of appealing to the irrational in one’s audience are, in a very practical sense, rational: means to ends.
So much for longwinded preliminaries. In this post, I’m assuming that rationality is a good – not infinitely or exclusively good, but a good – and asking if we can learn to be more rational, and if so, how.
Intellectual rationality, as Inside the Liberal Arts argues, is a toolbox containing a spectrum of tools for thought. This spectrum begins with formal logic, because without that, we don’t get very far. The rules of formal logic merely ensure that we don’t contradict ourselves or bungle our definitions; they add no facts or insights about the world. But observing them is where we must start from if we’re to get anywhere at all.
The second band of this spectrum is informal logic, which contains a number of sub-bands that make up what is sometimes referred to as “critical thinking.” Personally, I prefer to equate critical thinking with all rationality – including the practical kind, pursuing attainable ends by appropriate means. And critical thinking in this conventional sense involves a litany of specific skills.
Some problems arise. First, like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, scholars of critical thinking can’t agree on a single roster of critical thinking skills; although there’s considerable overlap, there’s no closing the system. Second, they can’t agree on whether critical thinking (or CT) should be taught “within the disciplines” or as a stand-alone subject, where it runs the risk of being too dry a well to drink from.
A third problem is that these CT scholars have lived, for a generation or more, in an intellectual ghetto, marginalized by the academic community at large. This is unfortunate, because they’ve done some valuable work, and it’s perverse that that work is ignored precisely because of its trans-disciplinary nature. A further curiosity is that philosophers, who are (historically, conceptually, and professionally) the very progenitors and stewards of critical thinking, are especially averse to using the term or engaging with its analysts.
But enough. In the next post (Part II of Learning and Rationality) I’ll try to come up with the goods – or some of them, anyway – on how we can teach higher levels of rationality.