The meaning of rationality - Part II
In the process of achieving this, we may fall prey to those circumstances where human rationality degrades. Often when one expects the truth to remain hidden for long time, or when the stakes are very low, or very high, we can lose rational sight.
RATIONALITY IS ascribed with as many as twelve values. These are:
- Curiosity or a burning desire to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.
- Relinquishment of beliefs, if they turn out to be wrong or illogical
- Lightness, that is non rigidity in the process of understanding the world around us. We should be able to adapt ourselves to new systems of though that have been proven by evidence.
- Evenness should exist in beliefs. If one asks that does this evidence permit to believe, one should also ask, does this evidence force me to believe.
- The argumentative nature should not be left behind, as these debates and discussions, give rise to rationalism. Those who smile wisely and say: “I will not argue” remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the community effort.
- Empiricism, which means that the roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction.
- Simplicity, which believes that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Humility, that is exercised in taking actions in anticipation of one's errors.
- Perfectionism, which is the ultimate goal of rational behaviour and is learnt via anticipatory actions taken in regard to one's errors.
- Precision, in thought and action, in order to achieve the above mentioned overall goal.
- Scholarship, which learnt via a rational process of behaviour and thought and is undertaken in the study of many sciences. This would aid in achievement of a unified knowledge without any gaps.
- The void: This virtue is a virtue which is nameless. If for many years, one practices the techniques and submits himself/herself to strict constraints, one may be able to have a glimpse at the centre. This would lead to the knowledge that all techniques are one.
Rationality has another dimension which is called epistemic rationality. This has two major components, namely, smarts, that is, the ability that infers truth from information under ideal circumstances and toughness, which is an ability to limit performance degradation as circumstances worsen. The first takes a lot of time, energy and perseverance.
In the process of achieving this, we may fall prey to those circumstances where human rationality degrades. Often when one expects the truth to remain hidden for long time, or when the stakes are very low, or very high, we can lose rational sight. Similarly, if one begins to give precedence to certain views and implicitly rejects others, due to personal bias or when they are not brutally honest
It seems relatively easy to test rationality smarts, as the respondents are repeatedly given pertinent information and time to work new problems and measure their accuracy, calibration, etc. However, for testing rationality toughness, there is a requirement to compare performance on information on similar pairs of good/bad circumstance problems.
For example, assume people are better at evaluating if a spouse is cheating when considering an acquaintance in their social circle, relative to a stranger or their own spouse. If so, we could pose them a pair of problems with very similar information structure, one with an easy spouse and one with a hard spouse. The closeness of their response in these two cases would then be a measure of their rationality toughness.
There is also a training technique: consider matched hard/easy circumstance problems and compare their answers, separated by enough time that the respondents forget most of the previous analysis.
 | Previous Post |
Login
 Login through Social ID
|
