So last time we were taking an in-depth look at the work of Stanovich and rationality because we are building towards an account of wisdom, because that is deeply intertwined with the cultivation of enlightenment and (of course) with the cultivation of meaning.
We noted that rationality is an existential issue. It’s not just a matter of how we’re processing information, it’s something that’s constitutive of our identity in important ways and our mode of being in the world (we’ll come back to that again).
One of the core things we saw as we took a look at the rationality debate (in which Stanovich’s work was situated) is that debate showed us a couple of important things: it showed us that rationality does not equal logicality and it does not equal intelligence, that debate also showed us that we need multiple competencies when we’re talking about rationality. We need an inferential competency and we need an independent competency of control and then I propose to you how we could understand what that competency is, and what the normative theory is acting upon it: namely, insight / good problem formulation.
We then moved into what Stanovich saw as the missing pieces. If intelligence doesn’t give us rationality, what’s the missing pieces? Two missing pieces, they overlap in some important ways: one is the notion he calls mindware (what I’ve called psychotechnology), the other is a cognitive style that he talked about, active open-mindedness (which he gets from Jonathan Baron) and this is the idea that what you should do is cultivate a sensitivity and an ongoing awareness of the presence and effect of cognitive biases in your cognitive behavior / your cognitive life, and to actively counteract them.
I pointed out that, unlike Stanovich who doesn’t emphasize this as much, Jonathan Baron (who’s the originator of this idea as a constitutive feature of rationality) points out that you can’t do that too much, because if you try to override too many of your cognitive biases you of course will also be overriding them in their functioning as heuristics that help you avoid combinatorial explosions. So getting an optimal form of active open-mindedness rather than a maximal form of it is crucial to rationality.
I want to just briefly stop here and be a little bit more precise about how I want to use this term. I’ve been using it throughout and I basically defined it by example and then through exemplification but I want to be a little bit clearer about it because it’s going to be relevant as we go forward and talk about wisdom. So here’s the definition I want to offer to try to clarify what I mean and how I’m using the term psychotechnology. As I said, I don’t claim to be the originator of this idea but I am claiming that this is the particular slant I’m taking on the idea of psychotechnology. “The psychotechnology is a socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that’s readily internalizable into human cognition and that can be applied in a domain-general manner.” That’s crucial—it must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner and be highly generalizable among people. Prototypical instances are literacy, numeracy, and graphing. So I just want to make it very clear that it’s not just anything we use mentally will count as a psychotechnology, so the cognitive style of active open-mindedness will probably make use of psychotechnologies in order to help track bias but obviously Stanovich means something much more comprehensive; he means a set of skills, psychotechnologies, sensibilities, and sensitivities that will help you in a domain-general manner; note and actively respond to the presence of cognitive bias.
We can then ask what is it about people that, if intelligence is insufficient for this, what is it about people that is predictive of them acquiring [active open-mindedness]? Now, this is learnable, and we talked about the need for cognition as being an important predictor. So this is the degree to which you are motivated to go out and look for problems, you’re trying to find, formulate, and solve problems. So in that sense you are generating your own instances of learning and problem-solving in a quite directed and comprehensive manner.
A long summary (as is typical for ‘multi-part’ episodes; this is the second of three episodes on rationality, which is bridging to three episodes on wisdom). I think the rationality debate is mostly… old news, or something? It’s nice to see the ‘purely academic’ version of it, but there aren’t really any surprises, and Vervaeke is coming at it from a view that seems pretty close to “rationalists should win” to me.
Episode 41: What is Rationality?
A long summary (as is typical for ‘multi-part’ episodes; this is the second of three episodes on rationality, which is bridging to three episodes on wisdom). I think the rationality debate is mostly… old news, or something? It’s nice to see the ‘purely academic’ version of it, but there aren’t really any surprises, and Vervaeke is coming at it from a view that seems pretty close to “rationalists should win” to me.