Rationality, not so easy as it looks

LISTEN. Tonight in Rationality we focus on logic and critical thinking (Pinker's chapter 3) and probability and randomness (4), with our first report presentation on what Carl Sagan (or his editor) in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark with euphemistic gentility called Baloney. But let's call it a spade. Let's call in Harry Frankfurt.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share... It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction... Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” "On Bullshit"

I didn't much know what I was talking about back in my first year of grad school, when I was pressed into service as a Teaching Assistant in the late John Post's logic and critical thinking course at Vandy. One of my TA colleagues knew quite a lot about biochemistry, she already had a PhD in the subject and would go on to tack one on in philosophy... and then to make a significant research contribution in the urgent quest to develop a COVID vaccine in 2020.

Another of my peers would go on to distinguish himself as a premier contemporary epistemologist, working out of Chicago. I had and have great regard for his logical acuity, notwithstanding my Jamesian disdain for "the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the Philosophical Review and elsewhere, fed on 'books of reference,' and never confounding 'Æsthetik' with 'Erkentnisstheorie.' Faugh!" 

Faugh indeed. That would be my absolute favorite imprecation, if only it wouldn't confuse people who thought James and I were referencing Asian cuisine and not hair-splitting logic-chopping self-exalting anal analytics. I'm sure Santayana caught his drift, though, in that 1905 letter.

We taught a text called Reasoning that year, 1980. When I got a chance to teach my own critical thinking course--they're all critical thinking courses, of course--I used the 1st edition of How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age (Schick & Vaughn), inspired by Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. 

A subsequent edition of Shermer included a chapter on why smart people believe weird things. Don't they know better than to accept ghosts and aliens and conspiracies (etc.) without rational evidence? At some level maybe, but we all know how to rationalize our hearts' desires and smart people are good at rationalizing. "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

That's why it's tricky, to walk that Jamesian tightrope whereby the subjective mark of rationality is as much a feeling or sentiment as an evidenced bit of cognition. But life is a tightrope, and it's whole people with all their biases and blindnesses and passions and prejudices who get to try to walk it.* Keeping our rational balance (like catching fly balls, noted Skeeter Barnes after lending me his glove one fine Herschel Greer Stadium pre-game Sunday a few decades back) is thus not so easy as it looks. (I caught one of three fly ball chances. And I fell on my ass doing it.)

Even trained professionals sometimes drop the ball and fall on their asses. Or make asses of themselves, smartly defending the indefensible propositions they've embraced non-smartly. 

Fortunately we have teammates who'll pick us up, if we'll let them. The non-sporting metaphorical equivalent of that is, of course, the collaborative approach to thinking James and I call Co-Philosophy.

* Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs..." SOR