A few days ago I was teaching my seminar on "Rationality and Collective Action" and we got to the inevitable question of what is rationality. The answers I got were not surprising, or wrong. The odd thing was that they were the answers an economist would give, and this in a room where most students were not Economics majors. So, they would fall back to the standard definition of rationality in economics that equates it to maximizing behavior or, if you like "thinking outside the box", "bounded optimization" a la Herbert Simon.
Like I said, there's nothing wrong with this notion of rationality. The problem is that it is a recent historical creation and it is crowding out many others. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "logical"? There used to be a time when we said that an argument was "rational" if it followed from the premises. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "grounded on careful examination"? When we talk about an "irrational fear of spiders" we're not saying that there's anything suboptimal about running away from spiders if one is afraid of them. We're saying that the fear itself is not grounded on any realistic assessment of what spiders are.
I think none of this would be a problem if we were thinking about economic issues. But economic discourse keeps penetrating other spheres (and, for the record, I don't think that's entirely bad; I myself do it) so we should be mindful that in those other spheres it would be very limiting to equate rationality to efficiency.
For example, in the seminar we were trying to make sense of what Hegel could mean about "rational laws" in his essay "On the English Reform Bill." He was clearly using the idiom of the XVIIIth Century enlightened thinkers in which rational laws are laws that derive from some process of reasoning that is transparent, open to scrutiny, not driven by fear of some hidden deity and so on. In that sense, a "rational law" is not necessarily efficient. Moreover, I can think of many laws that I would call rational that are inefficient. (Don't they always say that us socialists love screwing up the economy?)
If we want to understand politics and, more broadly, to build a "rationalist" social theory, something I'm committed to, we must start by addressing the fact that rationality is much more than efficiency. One place where this is particularly notorious is in the debate about deliberation in politics. Politics, like it or not, requires language. You don't have to agree with everything Habermas has ever said to recognize that. So, a rationalist research program of politics must be able to make sense of language as a rational activity. Which it is. Right now as you read these lines (well, no one is, but just pretending), you are trying to make sense of them using rationality. You're not optimizing anything in the process. You're simply trying to go from premises to conclusions in a way that makes sense. That is every bit as rational as maximizing a profit function.
I still don't have the faintest idea of the implications this might have. But it's been nagging me for long enough to put it here.
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