Rationality

From the Critical Cafe, 15 July 2009:

I don’t see how a theory could be ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’. It’s possible for a person to behave rationally, and therefore to adhere to a theory rationally.

It’s also possible for people to assent to the idea that a particular person is behaving (or adhering to a theory) rationally. Science makes that process as explicit as possible. But in general it’s impossible to know if a person is behaving rationally or not.

We can of course theorise about how people behave. For my money, the best theory of a large range of human behaviour is that people avoid cognitive dissonance. That is, they interpret or filter evidence to avoid clashing with an existing point of view or interest, because doing so avoids mental distress. (This seems to explain the behaviour of anthropogenic global warming denialists.)

This behaviour is, of course, the opposite of what critical rationalism regards as rational behaviour. But who is to say it’s not rational to the person rejecting the evidence? After all, if your main aim is to avoid pain (or to mislead other people into accepting something) rather than to discover the truth, then it may well be rational to behave in this way.

If your aim is to try to discover the truth about something, then CR says that the rational way of doing this is to cope with the evidence regardless of the pain it causes you.

It is possible to reason about these processes on a meta level too (to my mind ‘rational’ implies ‘reasoning’ implies ‘conscious’), and try to identify those parts of one’s mental processes that involve cognitive dissonance and consciously to override them. Any serious application of critical rationalism must involve this.

Richard Burnham