I’m not disagreeing with any of the content above, but a note about terminology--
LessWrong keeps using the word “rationalism” to mean something like “reason” or possibly even “scientific methodology”. In philosophy, however, “rationalism” is not allied to “empiricism”, but diametrically opposed to it. What we call science was a gradual development, over a few centuries, of methodologies that harnessed the powers both of rationalism and empiricism, which had previously been thought to be incompatible.
But if you talk to a modernist or post-modernist today, when they use the term “rational”, they mean old-school Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian rationalism. They, like us, think so much in this old Greek way that they may use the term “reason” when they mean “Aristotelian logic”. All post-modernism is based on the assumption that scientific methodology is essentially the combination of Platonic essences, Aristotelian physics, and Aristotelian logic, which is rationalism. They are completely ignorant of what science is and how it works. But this is partly our fault, because they hear us talking about science and using the term “rationality” as if science were rationalism!
(Inb4 somebody says Plato was a rationalist and Aristotle was an empiricist: Really, really not. Aristotle couldn’t measure things, and very likely couldn’t do arithmetic. In any case the most important Aristotelian writings to post-modernists are the Physics, which aren’t empirical in the slightest. No time to go into it here, though.)
I’m not disagreeing with any of the content above, but a note about terminology--
LessWrong keeps using the word “rationalism” to mean something like “reason” or possibly even “scientific methodology”. In philosophy, however, “rationalism” is not allied to “empiricism”, but diametrically opposed to it. What we call science was a gradual development, over a few centuries, of methodologies that harnessed the powers both of rationalism and empiricism, which had previously been thought to be incompatible.
But if you talk to a modernist or post-modernist today, when they use the term “rational”, they mean old-school Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian rationalism. They, like us, think so much in this old Greek way that they may use the term “reason” when they mean “Aristotelian logic”. All post-modernism is based on the assumption that scientific methodology is essentially the combination of Platonic essences, Aristotelian physics, and Aristotelian logic, which is rationalism. They are completely ignorant of what science is and how it works. But this is partly our fault, because they hear us talking about science and using the term “rationality” as if science were rationalism!
(Inb4 somebody says Plato was a rationalist and Aristotle was an empiricist: Really, really not. Aristotle couldn’t measure things, and very likely couldn’t do arithmetic. In any case the most important Aristotelian writings to post-modernists are the Physics, which aren’t empirical in the slightest. No time to go into it here, though.)