Abstract
Defenders of the Irrationality Thesis, i.e. the claim that humans generally are irrational, cite psychological studies which supposedly show that humans are incapable of applying even simple logical rules. Ernest Sosa argues that their argument rests on a faulty concept of rationality. On Sosa’s view, rationality cannot be defined in terms of adherence to rules of logic and probability; instead, he holds rationality to be both multidimensional and implicitly indexical. He concludes that on these grounds it is conceptually impossible for the Irrationality Thesis to be true. We argue that in order for Sosa’s account of rationality to be viable, he needs to elaborate on it in various ways: (1) Sosa must prove that the analogies that furnish his arguments (which liken rationality to tallness and acuity of vision) do in fact hold, or else he must provide further arguments. (2) Claiming that despite being implicitly indexical, rationality nevertheless rests on some absolute dimension(s), Sosa must inform us on how it is possible for us to determine the truth value of claims that attribute rationality to agents. (3) Lastly, we invoke the distinction between irrationality and arationality to demonstrate that Sosa’s refutation of the Irrationality Thesis comes at the price of an undefined, tacitly introduced factor, which needs elucidation.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, when presented with the right solution beforehand, subjects were capable of providing the correct explanation (cf. Johnson-Laird and Wason 1970, 135). According to Wason, a “bias towards verification” manifests in a “tendency to confirm, rather than eliminate hypotheses” misleads the subjects in thinking that 7 need not be turned (cf. Wason 1966, 147).
- 2.
Edward Stein (cf. 1996, 3 fn. 3) lists a number of authors who have come to this conclusion, among them Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work in this area is frequently quoted.
- 3.
The expression “Irrationality Thesis” is not Sosa’s, but Stein’s (cf. Stein 1996, 4).
- 4.
This approach is presented by Cohen (cf. 1981, 317ff.) and discussed in an Open Peer Commentary (p. 331–517).
- 5.
As the papers are nearly identical in content, we will cite only “Man the Rational Animal?” (Sosa and Galloway 2000).
- 6.
This “standard picture of rationality” is adopted from Stein (1996, 4).
- 7.
For a few short remarks on this example cf. fn. 14.
- 8.
To illustrate his point, Sosa draws our attention to people afflicted by the savant syndrome (cf. Sosa and Galloway 2000, 166).
- 9.
Please note that we do not mean to claim here that there is a clear cut divide between the dimensions of well-foundedness, justification and good reason. This list is merely a survey of the literature.
- 10.
We will return to these questions below (Sect. 4.5).
- 11.
We leave aside here the question whether people in the Middle Ages were in fact shorter than modern day humans, which has been contested by recent studies on human skeletons.
- 12.
Sosa’s analogies bear great argumentative weight. Whereas we acknowledge the heuristic value of the analogies from tallness and good vision, we are uncertain as to whether the cooking analogy mentioned before holds: Are there really principles of good cuisine? If violation of a culinary rule yields excellent results, maybe the culinary rule was ill-conceived to begin with.
- 13.
Remember Sosa’s claim that unlike intelligence “rational thought cannot be mindless” (Sosa and Galloway 2000, 166).
- 14.
Sosa tacitly subsumes both rationalityA and the relation “…is more/less rational than…” under the term “dimension”.
- 15.
Stein reports this fact: “There are two truisms that seem in tension but, at the same time, seem to coexist happily in our common-sense view of humans and rationality. On the one hand, we agree with Aristotle that man is a rational animal, while on the other hand, we agree with Freud that humans are irrational” (Stein 1996, 2). He continues to distinguish between the two senses of “rational” in much the same way as we do above by introducing rationalA and rationalI.
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Ester, M., Göhner, J.F., Tilmes, J. (2016). Man the Irrational Animal?. In: Bahr, A., Seidel, M. (eds) Ernest Sosa. Münster Lectures in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32519-4_4
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