FWIW, I would genuinely use the term ‘aspiring rationalist’ more if it struck me as more technically correct — in my head ‘person aspiring to be rational’ ≈ ‘rationalist’. So I parse aspiring rationalist as ‘person aspiring to be a person aspiring to be rational’.
‘Aspiring rationalist’ makes sense if I equate ‘rationalist’ with ‘rational’, but that’s exactly the thing I don’t want to do.
Maybe we just need a new word here. E.g., -esce is a root meaning “to become” (as in coalesce, acquiesce, evanesce, convalescent, iridescent, effervescent, quiescent). We could coin a new verb “rationalesce” and declare it means “to try to become more rational” or “to pursue rationality”, then refer to ourselves as the rationalescents.
Like adolescents, except for becoming rational rather than for becoming adult. :P
I’m in for coining a new word to refer to exactly what we mean.
I find it kind of annoying that if I talk about “rationality” on say, twitter, I have to wade through a bunch of prior assumptions that people have about what the term means (eg “trying to reason through everything is misguided. Most actual effective deciding is intuitive.”)
I would rather refer to the path of self honesty and aspirational epistemic perfection by some other name that doesn’t have prior associations, in the same way that if a person says “I’m a circler / I’m into Circling”, someone will reply “what’s circling?”.
FWIW, I would genuinely use the term ‘aspiring rationalist’ more if it struck me as more technically correct — in my head ‘person aspiring to be rational’ ≈ ‘rationalist’. So I parse aspiring rationalist as ‘person aspiring to be a person aspiring to be rational’.
‘Aspiring rationalist’ makes sense if I equate ‘rationalist’ with ‘rational’, but that’s exactly the thing I don’t want to do.
Maybe we just need a new word here. E.g., -esce is a root meaning “to become” (as in coalesce, acquiesce, evanesce, convalescent, iridescent, effervescent, quiescent). We could coin a new verb “rationalesce” and declare it means “to try to become more rational” or “to pursue rationality”, then refer to ourselves as the rationalescents.
Like adolescents, except for becoming rational rather than for becoming adult. :P
I’m in for coining a new word to refer to exactly what we mean.
I find it kind of annoying that if I talk about “rationality” on say, twitter, I have to wade through a bunch of prior assumptions that people have about what the term means (eg “trying to reason through everything is misguided. Most actual effective deciding is intuitive.”)
I would rather refer to the path of self honesty and aspirational epistemic perfection by some other name that doesn’t have prior associations, in the same way that if a person says “I’m a circler / I’m into Circling”, someone will reply “what’s circling?”.