Isn’t this a completely ludicrous example of “rationality”? What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”!
The rationality I was referring to wasn’t the rational control of the muscles. It was the rational belief that applying butter to knife and buttered knife to toast would result in buttered toast. I’m thinking of my favourite rebuke to the claim that “there are no atheists in a foxhole”: “Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as any one else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.”.
Our ‘common sense’ knowledge of the world is grounded in a basic rationalism. How could it be otherwise, given that rationality is ‘that process of thinking that delivers correct answers’? It has been empirically demonstrated that our rationality is flawed and limited however. I understand the term ‘instrumental rationality’ to mean simply the conscious application of the principles or rationality to achieving better results in the mundane business of everyday existence. Understanding where innate unthinking rationality fails is perhaps the most important step to improving our outcomes.
A practical distinction that is suggested to me by the term ‘instrumental rationality’ is the emphasis on only being as rational as is justified by the circumstances. It would be irrational to perform a full cost benefit analysis on toast buttering given that my current technique achieves acceptable results with minimal effort.
I’ll be honest with you, I have never detected utility in my belly.
Then I don’t think you’ve really understood the concept of utility. Rationality has had the most practical benefits for me when applied to achieving outcomes whose utility I can ‘feel in my belly’. I can’t perfectly calibrate a unit of measurement but by attempting to weigh up the relative utilities of different outcomes and let estimates of expected values of different choices influence my thinking I find I can usefully improve my decisions. That is really what I mean by ‘instrumental rationality’ - something less formal than full blown x-rationality but more conscious than the rationality which comes naturally and without thinking.
Here’s the crux of it. Your improvements will make use of the standard tools of epistemic rationality, the scientific method and all the rest of it.
Informed by but not identical with. I find the distinction useful. There are many decisions I have to make that do not justify the investment of resources required to perform a rigorous analysis but that seem to me to benefit from an effort to informally apply principles of rationality that (I feel but cannot rigorously prove) make me less wrong than I would be if I did not make a conscious effort to apply them.
One of the key (informal, non-rigorous) insights for me from Bayes’ Theorem is that it is perfectly rational to make best guesses derived from many uncertain inputs. There is no need to be certain of any of your premises to make decisions that are still the best decision you can make given the context.
The rationality I was referring to wasn’t the rational control of the muscles. It was the rational belief that applying butter to knife and buttered knife to toast would result in buttered toast. I’m thinking of my favourite rebuke to the claim that “there are no atheists in a foxhole”: “Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as any one else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.”.
Our ‘common sense’ knowledge of the world is grounded in a basic rationalism. How could it be otherwise, given that rationality is ‘that process of thinking that delivers correct answers’? It has been empirically demonstrated that our rationality is flawed and limited however. I understand the term ‘instrumental rationality’ to mean simply the conscious application of the principles or rationality to achieving better results in the mundane business of everyday existence. Understanding where innate unthinking rationality fails is perhaps the most important step to improving our outcomes.
A practical distinction that is suggested to me by the term ‘instrumental rationality’ is the emphasis on only being as rational as is justified by the circumstances. It would be irrational to perform a full cost benefit analysis on toast buttering given that my current technique achieves acceptable results with minimal effort.
Then I don’t think you’ve really understood the concept of utility. Rationality has had the most practical benefits for me when applied to achieving outcomes whose utility I can ‘feel in my belly’. I can’t perfectly calibrate a unit of measurement but by attempting to weigh up the relative utilities of different outcomes and let estimates of expected values of different choices influence my thinking I find I can usefully improve my decisions. That is really what I mean by ‘instrumental rationality’ - something less formal than full blown x-rationality but more conscious than the rationality which comes naturally and without thinking.
Informed by but not identical with. I find the distinction useful. There are many decisions I have to make that do not justify the investment of resources required to perform a rigorous analysis but that seem to me to benefit from an effort to informally apply principles of rationality that (I feel but cannot rigorously prove) make me less wrong than I would be if I did not make a conscious effort to apply them.
One of the key (informal, non-rigorous) insights for me from Bayes’ Theorem is that it is perfectly rational to make best guesses derived from many uncertain inputs. There is no need to be certain of any of your premises to make decisions that are still the best decision you can make given the context.