Once you get out into the real world, you quickly discover that there are no rational people. How do people manage to remain so irrational, to see no connections whatsoever between their contradictory thoughts and actions?
The human mind can sense an impending contradiction - precisely in the same way that we can smell smoke before seeing a fire. There are many who would rather live with their contradictions than resolve them. And so, these people find it imperative to avoiding seeing their contradictions at all. Mindfully, they sniff out the stink of impending contradiction and immediately look away. A contradiction is near - beware! Stop thinking now, before it's too late!
For, once you lay eyes on a contradiction, it is already too late - the contradiction demands resolution. However, you don't really need to resolve your cognitive dissonance, so long as you remain ignorant of its existence. It is in this way that most people live - for whatever reason, we pitiful human souls are simply too lazy and comfortable to bear through the work that is necessary to become rational and consistent in both thought and deed.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Rational criticism of this kind apparently presupposes that there are objective reasons and values, providing standards for the assessment of ends that are independent from psychological facts about what people happen to be motivated to pursue. From a more naturalistic perspective, it could be doubted whether such independent standards can be reconciled with contemporary metaphysical commitments. The connection of perceived “rationality” with intentional action raises large questions about its credentials as a capacity for genuine reasoning.
Firstly, intentional action is not mere physical movement, but reflects a distinctive attitude of the agent's intention. To be in this kind of mental state is to have settled on a plan which one seeks to realize through one's action. Intention seems in this respect to be strikingly unlike belief. Propositional attitudes of the latter sort have a representational function; they aim to fit the way the world is, so that if one discovers that the world is not how one previously took it to be, one will acknowledge pressure to modify one's belief in the relevant dimension (pressure to which one will respond if one is not irrational).
With intentions, however, things seem crucially different in this respect. Your intention to go get coffee on a Friday, for instance, is not a state that would or should be abandoned upon ascertaining or confirming that you have not (yet) gotten coffee on Friday; rather a person with such an intention will ordinarily try to bring the world into alignment with the intention, by getting coffee when Friday comes around. Intentions are in this way more like an architect's blueprints than like sketches of an already-completed structure. The difficulty, in a nutshell, is to make sense of the suggestion that a genuinely rational process could by itself generate states with the peculiar function of intentions. Reason seems a capacity for cognitive operations, whereas intentions are distinctively noncognitive states, insofar as they do not aim to reflect independent facts of the matter about the way things happen to be in the world.
There are a few things that I left out of the post that I should have put in. The first is this definition of rationality, according to the book "Games People Play" by Eric Berne.
"When I say you are irrational I do not mean that I do not respect your goals or preferences, but rather that YOU do not respect them, as you act counter to how one would act if one had such goals and preferences in mind."
In this sense, rationality is used as a loose synonym of "consistency".
The other thing that I left out was a good concrete example of the kind of irrationality I was trying to discuss in the post. It would be common, everyday irrationality; a person complains about how much they hate work and yet they are genuinely friendly with their boss. How could they not connect these two notions? How could they not see that the work they hate so much is coming from the boss they like so much? It doesn't make sense. This person simply does not see the connection, because they sense that it is near, and for that reason suspend their thought.
Also, regarding your comments on intentionality and rationality, etc., I will write an extended response shortly.
Referring again to the quote from "Games People Play", I do not allude to any objective reasons or values whatsoever. I do not criticize why people want the things they say they want, except to indicate that their actions are often not in accord with their aims. I am tolerant of any viewpoint whatsoever, the only thing that I request is that others be consistent. If you hate your job, then you should hate the cause of what you hate, since it is that cause which is the source of your malcontent. Consistency is the only thing that matters, and without it there can be no "jumping off point" for a common understanding.
Secondly, regarding "intentionality". Are you talking about "intentional content" in the sense of phenomenology (or any of the other many schools of thought which talk about intentionality in very peculiar and non-colloquial senses) or are you referring to the ordinary use of the word "intentions", as in "I intended to do that, but things didn't work out that way"? It seems that you are talking about the latter, in which case I have only this to say:
All the good intentions in the world don't amount to a hill of beans.
Post a Comment