Eva Durant wrote:
> Uncompromising means, not changing opinions even when
> presented rational reasons to do so. In the absence of such
> what can I do? What if my opinion is actually a good
> approximation to reality, <snip>
Let's take a harder look at rational thought:
"Rational thinking ... cannot predict the future. All it can do is to
map out the probability space as it appears at the present, and which
will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states
will have materialized. Technological and social inventions broaden this
probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it
was before the Industrial Revolution, for good or for evil.
"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was
man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The
mental processes of invention are still mysterious. They are rational,
but not logical, that is to say not deductive. The first step of the
technological or social inventor is to visualize, by an act of
imagination, a thing or a state of things which does not yet exist, and
which to him appears in some way desirable. He can then start rationally
arguing backwards from the invention, and forward from the means at his
disposal, until a way is found from one to the other."
( D. Gabor, Inventing the Future, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 161)
"... criticisms of rational (decision-making) model:
1.Success in goal attainment means commitment to the goal, and
commitment is an emotional -- thus nonrational -- state ...
2.All groups have several goals ... so that over-specialization may
threaten survival ...
3.... it is very difficult to gain agreement on just what goals or
goal are being sought ..."
(W. Breed, The Self-Guiding Society, The Free Press, 1971, pp. 95-96)
"Several critics of the rational model suggest a second approach to
decision-making -- incrementalism.
"Two major weaknesses ... First ... reflects the interests of the most
powerful groupings in society ... second .. ignores overdue
innovations."
(ibid., pp. 99-101)
"The model (of decision-making) we recommend is called mixed scanning.
"An example of mixed scanning: weather satellites hold two cameras. One
takes broad-angle pictures covering large segments of the sky ... The
other lens photographs much smaller segments but in much greater detail
... dual scanning device ... scans for signs of trouble. The second
camera explores these danger points in detail ...
"When criticism shows that a policy is ineffective, stop incrementing
and turn to more encompassing scanning."
(ibid., pp. 103-111)
"Intellectual competence will be judged in terms of the ability of the
student to synthesize the explosion of information. Most significant
thinking will be reflective ... Men will succeed or not in the measure
of their ability to order information into unity and to evaluate and
judge (Aristotle's order of judgment again, his very principle for
distinguishing wisdom
from mere science)."
(F. D. Wilhelmsen and J. Bret, The War in Man, University of Georgia
Press, 1970), p. 35)
"Kant's complaint against Cartesianism was based on his insistence that
pure rationalist analysis can never add to our knowledge. Analytic
thinking can simply penetrate and arrange the already given, the already
possessed ... True progress in knowledge -- not specifically in the
sense of knowledge possessed by me as an individual, but in the sense of
adding to the entire store of knowledge possessed by mankind -- is
synthetic."
(ibid., pp. 42-43)
"Belloc hit it when he wrote: 'It is in the character of unwisdom to
analyze and to proceed upon the results of analysis: in the character of
wisdom to integrate the whole point.' But we are leaving the Age of
Analysis patterned after mechanical models and rigid deduction, all of
which involve very hard 'work', whether it be the analysis of a literary
text into its component parts or of a chemical compound into its
elements. We are entering an Age of Synthesis that will demand a maximum
of talent concentrated in men who simply occupy positions in society and
who will be paid to synthesize, 'to integrate the whole point'."
(ibid., p. 97)
"There is in the philosophy of science a doctrine known as reductionism.
Its proponents argue that eventually all of the processes of nature will
be shown to be physical processes; or, in an alternative statement, that
all of the natural sciences will eventually be found subsumed under the
principles of physics."
(R. Schlegel, Inquiry into Science: Its Domain and Limits, Doubleday,
1972, p. 68)
"There is the point to be made that because of the indeterminism that
physics has found in nature on the microscopic level, there will be no
explanation in science for why one individual quantum event occurs
rather than another that may be equally probable. This limitation could
be accepted as merely the consequence of an element of chance in nature.
But in a more general way, it is associated with the breakdown of close
space-time description for individual quantum events. With these, we
come to an end of science as a rational ordering, just because the
individual event cannot be known through any kind of predictive
calculation but only through measurement. Indeed, as we have seen, the
clear implication of the Superposition Principle of quantum mechanics is
that the individual event is created, in one state out of a number of
possible states, in the interaction observation process ... on the
quantum level we must simply accept the being of individual events as
they occur."
(ibid., p. 73)
"... the deductive system rests on principles or axioms which are
themselves simply to be accepted, and hence without explanation in the
sense of being consequences of some other assertions of the system."
(ibid., p. 74)
"... we might consider the sentiments in early and mid-nineteenth
century America that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in the
United States. Many people of course participated in leading popular
thought and action, but we can cite a novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the impact of a political leader, Abraham
Lincoln, as being among the major influences. The arguments for
abolition arose from many facets of human experience and with varied
kinds of religious and philosophical support. And in spite of
counter-arguments and social inertia, a conviction that involved a
change in assumptions about human lives did eventually carry the day.
New social-industrial factors may well have been, as some have argued, a
factor in the challenge. The humanist, in any event, can be responsive
to the total situation of his times."
(ibid., pp. 86-87)
"...I should emphasize that I do not mean that formal reasoning should
be abolished. On the contrary. I hold it to be the most penetrating of
all modes of thinking. But for that very reason, it is also so
dangerous. Indeed, I think it is for its dogmatism and not for its
abstraction that most of the social sciences are open to what Whitehead
once labeled the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, by which he meant
that there are some aspects of reality which are ignored when we force
our thinking into the preselected categories of conventional reasoning."
(G. Olsson, Birds in Egg, Michigan Geographical Publication No. 15,
Dept. of Geography, University of Michigan, 1975, pp. 15-16)
"It is by allying himself with objectivity that modern man has increased
his sense of society and decreased the sense of himself. By employing
analytic techniques which assume all ambiguity away, he produces
distorted theory and inhibiting practice. In this manner, the analyst
forces the fuzzy aspects of human action into the categorial exactness
of his thought. In due course, this practice leads the centralized
bureaucrat into acts of thingification."
(ibid., p. 159)
"If evil can grow out of our efforts to do good, it also seems to be the
case that good can grow out of our efforts to do evil. The Roman
military engineers built the roads that the Christian missionaries
traveled to convert an empire. The British executed by firing squad the
Irish rebels of 1916, and thus helped to free Ireland. The Nazis
executed the six million, and thus helped to bring the State of Israel
into existence. But much of this seems unconscious, for those who do
evil certainly do not plan to have good result from it, and those who
think they are working for progress do not wish to create apocalypse.
The inventor of the aerosol spray did not wish to destroy the ozone
layer of the planet, but whether it is dynamite, atomic energy,
psychosurgery, or genetic engineering, it does seem to be the case that
our very unconsciousness of these enantiodromias increases the
likelihood of evil emerging from our acts. It is no longer safe to
assume that good intentions are enough. One can wreak havoc with
benevolence as well as with malevolence; therefore we have to stop and
call into question the ideas of progress and philanthropy upon which
modern liberalism is based."
(W. I. Thompson, Evil and World Order, Harper and Row, 1976, p. 80)
--
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/
