Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life

A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of Rationality

Mikael Stenmark

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268091675
• Thema: Filosofia
• Thema: Umanesimo in filosofia

Mikael Stenmark examines four models of rationality and argues for a discussion of rationality that takes into account the function and aim of such human practices as science and religion.

1

Introduction

Something that is characteristic of us human heings is that we form beliefs about a vast number of things and under certain circumstances change and reject some of these beliefs. What we encounter not only makes us believe certain things, it also makes us change what we believe. So part of being human is to have the ability to form, revise, and reject beliefs. These cognitive tools of ours are sometimes called belief-formation and belief-regulation processes. We might wonder about when it is that people form and regulate their beliefs in a proper, responsible, or reasonable way. We often say that to perform such and such an action is not a reasonable thing to do, or to think so and so can hardly be justified. When we ask these kinds of questions we are, in fact, dealing with issues of rationality. And we make this kind of evaluation of what people do all the time and in almost all areas of life. A central problem for philosophy is, therefore, to try to make clear what rationality is and under what conditions we should say that something is rational.

People form and hold beliefs in a lot of different areas or contexts, in science, religion, everyday life, politics, and so on. However, people in different places, cultures, and times acquire a lot of different and incompatible beliefs about all sorts of things. And sometimes we say or hear: “That was reasonable to believe for people living in the Middle Ages or that is reasonable for people of other cultures to believe, but not for us.” Or alternatively, we say or hear: “This is what they believe in a primitive tribe, but that is not reasonable to believe”—and sometimes it is presupposed that what is reasonable is to believe as we do in a modern Western society. But what should we say of these assessments? Is rationality the same for all people and for all areas of life, or did rationality mean one thing then and another thing now and a certain thing in one area of life and something else in another? This is another question philosophers have to address and try to answer, whether this reasonableness or responsibility is the same in all the areas in which we form and hold beliefs or if it changes as we change areas or contexts. Another way of putting this is to ask whether the conditions for rational belief formation and regulation are the same everywhere or if they change with circumstances, and—if they change—to what degree.

Roughly, these are the questions that will occupy this study. Of course to be able to answer especially this last group of questions we need to know a bit about what rationality is, so that we know what to look for. On the other hand, I will claim, we cannot know what rationality is without examining some concrete instantiations of it in practice. Therefore, I will look at and compare three areas of human thought—science, religion, and everyday life. The focus will be on beliefs or believing, without, of course, assuming that that is all that is going on in these domains. In relation to these areas, four models of rationality will be developed and critically examined.

1. Science, Religion, and Everyday Life

In science, scientists form beliefs about how different natural or cultural phenomena interact with each other They build theories about these phenomena and their interactions, and they try to assess which theories present these phenomena and their interactions in the best way. In this context we may wonder about what the conditions for accepting and holding on to a theory are—what the standards for theory-choice and theory-acceptance are.

Any proper model of rationality must, it seems, somehow deal with science and the kind of reasoning that goes on there. We have to ask ourselves what impact or status science has on the discussion of rationality. As Putnam notes:

And if what impressed the Few about science from the start was its stunning intellectual success, there is no doubt that what has impressed the Many is its overwhelming material and technological success. We are impressed by this even when it threatens our very lives.¹

Science is taken by most models of rationality as something of a paradigm example of rationality in action. Science provides a test case of accounts of rationality. But we will see that the advocates of the different models that I shall present understand the paradigmatic status of science in different ways, and this has important consequences in our assessment of the models.

In religion, religious believers form beliefs about God (or gods) or the sacred and its relation to us and our situation. Religious convictions develop as the result of experiences of suffering and joy, of meaning and meaninglessness (or alienation), of guilt and liberation (or salvation), or the like. Creeds are created to express these existential experiences and sanction their proper solutions. New experiences confirm, undermine, or lead to the rejection of these beliefs or creeds; and new ones come in their place. In this context we may also wonder what the conditions are for accepting or rejecting a belief, and even more drastically, if any belief of this sort is rationally acceptable.

In everyday life, we form beliefs about other people—relatives, mates, strangers, TV stars, and so on, about our relationships to these people and how to communicate with them, about how to drive a car and bake a cake, and about thousands of other things. In this context we may also wonder about how beliefs are accepted, revised, or rejected, and about what standards of rationality ought to be used. In fact, this is the area of life in which we have most of our beliefs, and it is not optional whether or not we participate in it, as with science and religion. To abandon our beliefs of everyday life is in fact to give up life. Hence these beliefs are of great but ignored importance, I will claim, when developing an appropriate model of rationality. In this sense (though in a different sense than science) everyday beliefs are also paradigm cases of rationality in action, because a proper model of rationality must be able to make sense out of everyday life belief formation and regulation.

The question that I shall address is whether we can say that the ways of forming and holding beliefs in these three areas of life have something in common, and if so, we have to determine what it is that they have in common. Or are these human practices so different that nothing concerning how one should form and regulate one’s beliefs in one of the practices has any resemblance to how one proceeds in the other practices? In particular, the focus will be on religious practice and religious belief: what standards of rationality, if any, should apply, and can it be rational to be religious or accept religious beliefs? More specifically, the questions I shall try to answer are:

1. What is rationality and under what conditions is something rational?

2. Is the notion of rationality applicable to religious and non-religious views of life? And if so, what standards of rationality are appropriate to use to evaluate that kind of activities or beliefs?

3. Is rationality the same in all areas of life, in all places, and at all times?

In addressing these questions I shall also try to spell out, to some extent, the relationship between rationality and related epistemic notions like justification, knowledge, truth, evidence, and grounds.

2. Theoretical, Practical, and Axiological Rationality

What kinds of things can be rational? Obviously not trees, machine-guns, or planets. However, many things can be characterized as rational, for instance, propositions, beliefs, decisions, actions, behaviors, plans, strategies, persons, and so on. The fact that trees, machine-guns, or planets cannot be considered rational gives us a clue to when it is appropriate to apply the term “rational.” We can say that in these cases the questions of rationality do not properly arise, and we can describe such situations with the term “a-rational.” Another example is questions concerning taste, whether one likes blondes or brunettes, ice-cream or pizza. In these situations we cannot say that it is irrational to like blondes and pizza. Rather these questions fall outside the scope of rationality. Hence the terms “rational” and “irrational” describe situations in which the question of rationality does properly arise. The term “irrational” describes those cases when the demands of rationality (whatever they are) are violated, and the term “rational” those cases in which these demands are fulfilled.

Basically we can say that there are three contexts of rationality. Rescher writes that: “Reason can (and should) come into operation whenever we are in a position to decide what to do—whenever a choice or decision confronts us.”² And philosophers have in general thought that the areas where we can decide what to do are those of belief, action, and evaluation. Hence the contexts of rationality are theoretical, practical, and axiological:

1. Theoretical rationality is concerned with what we (or some other kinds of beings) should believe or accept.

2. Practical rationality is concerned with what we (or some other kinds of beings) should do or perform.

3. Axiological rationality is concerned with what we (or some other kinds of beings) should value or prefer.

As we will see, however, some philosophers claim that questions concerning values, preferences, or desires fall outside the scope of rationality. But I will reject such a restriction and claim that people can be fully rational in their beliefs (more exactly, their believings, to use Chisholm’s term)³ or actions only if the ends or aims they try to achieve—via their beliefs and actions—are in their real interest. I shall also claim that axiological or evaluative rationality is of great importance when we try to determine whether it is rational to accept religious beliefs. In this, one of my main objectives becomes clear, that of arguing against a too narrow conception of what “rationality” is all about.

3. Realistic and Idealized Models of Rationality

Rationality has to be realistic, at least so I will claim, in the sense that it cannot require more than what the supposed agent (or agents) can possibly be expected to do.⁴ But what can reasonably be expected of someone depends on the agent’s resources and circumstances. The thesis that rationality has to be realistic is expressed by what will be called the axiom of reasonable demand: one cannot reasonably demand of a person what he or she cannot (possibly) do. If rationality is realistic, this means that a proper model of rationality must take into account the constitution and the actual predicament of the agent. Typically, the agent is an actual being of some sort. Almost exclusively, the agents are then human beings, but they can of course also be real beings of other kinds such as highly developed animals. However, as we will see and surprisingly enough, the explicit or implicit agent of rationality discussed by philosophers is often a fictive being of some sort, a theoretical construction of some kind, like a purely epistemic being or an ideal observer.

Idealized models of rationality (or maybe better: too idealized models of rationality, since rationality always involves a degree of idealization), on the other hand, are those models which reject the axiom of reasonable demand—that ask of the agent more than what that creature can possibly do. Hence, idealizations are always relative to who the agent of rationality is supposed to be. If, however, rationality is realistic and we are interested in the rationality of the beliefs, actions, and evaluations of human beings, then we have to take into account the constitution and predicament of actual human beings when developing or examining existing models of rationality. A second main thesis of mine, maybe more radical than the first thesis, is a consequence of this understanding of rationality. It consists of the claim that most conceptions of rationality proposed by philosophers have been far too idealized or utopian to apply in an interesting way to actual human agents like you and me. In fact, if taken literally, they imply that human beings are usually irrational in what they do.

In particular, this understanding of rationality will lead me to reject one of the cornerstones in many, maybe most, models of rationality, evidentialism. Roughly, evidentialism is the view that it is rational to accept a proposition (belief, theory, and the like) only if, and to the extent that, there are good reasons to believe that it is true. More generally, rationality calls for proceeding on the basis of good reasons for whatever we do—believe, act, or evaluate. Essentially my argument for rejecting evidentialism is that if evidentialism is true, then we are irrational in believing most of the things we believe, which is an absurd consequence, and, therefore, we should reject evidentialism.

Instead, I shall try to defend a position that will be called, for lack of any better term, presumptionism, since its advocates claim that our belief-forming processes and their outputs (beliefs) should be presumed to be intellectually innocent until proven guilty. These processes and their products do not first need to be justified (given good reasons for) before it is rational for us to believe them. Instead, our beliefs are initially justified through the force of a presumption. It is rational, at least initially, to believe what our experiences or belief-forming processes lead us to believe. People are intellectually permitted to accept what they believe without good reasons that support them, as long as they do not know that good reasons against what they believe have emerged. So our initial attitude to our beliefs should not be skepticism, as the evidentialist claims, but trust—in fact, what else can we reasonably do? Basically, the argument I shall give for why we should accept presumptionism is that it does not waste unreasonably much of our limited cognitive resources. It does not—unlike evidentialism—create chaos in our thoughts and paralyze our actions if it is literally followed.

4. Philosophical Research Programs

So one thesis of mine is that when we consider questions of rationality we have to take into account real people, real science, and real religion, and so on, if we expect to be able to apply our models of rationality in these real-life domains. Much of my criticism against different accounts of rationality, concerning the possibility of applying them to science, religion, and everyday life, will be based on this claim. But must philosophers take into account empirical considerations of this sort when they try to construct a model of rationality? Is it not enough if they focus on strictly conceptual and logical matters? Behind these questions and the answers that are given to them, we can find a disagreement among philosophers deeper than the one about how we should proceed in issues concerning rationality. In fact, it is possible to distinguish three basic research programs in philosophy, concerning how to do philosophy properly, which not only apply to rationality but to any, or almost any, issue philosophers can address. These philosophical programs or methods I shall call the formal, the contextual, and the practice-oriented approach—that are applicable to rationality, explanation, science, religion, and so on.

The first two approaches can be seen as situated at each side of a spectrum and the third as an inter-mediating position. To make the differences among them clear I shall describe them as more extreme than they may typically be expressed or presupposed to be. But one’s position is, of course, a matter of degree, and exactly where the formal approach becomes practice-oriented and the practice-oriented approach becomes contextual, or vice versa, is a difficult question and will at least for now remain an open question. However, despite this problem, it is not so hard to characterize pure or paradigmatic versions of them.

The advocates of the formal approach to philosophy (the formalists) claim that the formulation of adequate standards for assessing some aspect (in this case rationality) of activities such as science and religion can be done independently from the actual practices of scientists and religious believers. These standards should rather be arrived at by performing a purely conceptual and logical inquiry. On this account it is the philosophical standards or models that have epistemological authority not the practices themselves. And the aim for the formalist working with questions of rationality is to formulate a conception of rationality which would be appropriate for any reasoning being, which would be good no matter what practice the agent is involved in, and no matter what the world is like.

So, for instance, the formalist assumes that the problem of scientific rationality should be approached by developing a general characterization of rationality and then by understanding scientific rationality as a special, or maybe the only, case of it. The way to proceed is to first formulate a general model of rationality and then use it to formulate standards concerning the rationality of the claims made by scientists. No examination of the history of science or of the contemporary practice of science is needed as a basis for a recommendation of appropriate standards for scientific rationality.

The problem of the rationality of religious faith is approached by the formalists in philosophy of religion in the same way as their colleagues address scientific rationality in philosophy of science. If the formalists are negative towards relig...