[MD] QRE: The 4th. level's two interpretations. Par

[X Acto]

Hi Steve,

> Steve:
> If an ancient people provided reasons for what they did, then they
> participated in the intellectual pattern of providing reasons for what
> they do. Reasoning is what Pirsig means by intellect.
>
> Ron:
> I believe it is important to make the distinction between the terms "rational"
> and "reason". Often they are taken to mean the same .
> This I believe, creates problems in understanding in discussions of this
> nature.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

Steve:

I don't see any important difference between these two terms other
than that one is an adjective and the other a noun. Can you explain
what you see as important?

In dictionary.com I find:

ra⋅tion⋅al  /ˈræʃənl, ˈræʃnl/
–adjective 1. agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible: a rational
plan for economic development.

I think when we say an explanation is reasonable or rational, we are
saying that it has a sort of quality--intellectual quality. If someone
attempts to give reasons, whether or not the reasons are good ones,
that person is participating in intellectual patterning. The
intellectual patterns in question may be of higher or lower quality,
but reasoning is always a synonym for participating in intellectual
patterns as I understand the MOQ.

Ron:
I tend to agree with your view, In my reading of the distinction "reason"
is a cognitive ability while "rational" is a system of reason. To be "rational"
is to be unemotional and objective.

"Reason is the mental faculty that is able to generate conclusions from assumptions or premises."

while

"Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, 
is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". 
If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person 
has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, 
instincts or culturally specific, moral codes and norms, then the 
analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias."

I suppose what I'm getting at is the idea of the myth of  the"rational"
thought, how, in our modern use of terms they co-mingle and conflaguate
meaning, making the lines between the ability to think and a system of
thought blurred. In other words, to sum up the MoQ stance, that western
cultures rational is the flaw in it's reason.

"In the course of this paper we touch on each of these projects and 
consider some of the relationships among them.  Our point of departure, 
however, is an array of very unsettling experimental results which, many 
have believed, suggest a grim outcome to the evaluative project and 
support a deeply pessimistic view of human rationality. The results that 
have led to this evaluation started to emerge in the early 1970s when 
Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and a number of other psychologists began 
reporting findings suggesting that under quite ordinary circumstances, 
people reason and make decisions in ways that systematically violate 
familiar canons of rationality on a broad array of problems. Those first 
surprising studies sparked the growth of an enormously influential 
research program – often called the heuristics and biases program – 
whose impact has been felt in a wide range of disciplines including 
psychology, economics, political theory and medicine. In section 2, 
we provide a brief overview of some of the more disquieting experimental 
findings in this area.  

 
            What precisely do these experimental results show? Though 
there is considerable debate over this question, one widely discussed 
interpretation that is often associated with the heuristics and biases 
tradition claims that they have “bleak implications” for the rationality 
of the man and woman in the street. What the studies indicate, 
according to this interpretation, is that ordinary people lack the 
underlying rational competence to handle a wide array of reasoning tasks,
 and thus that they must exploit a collection of simple heuristics which 
make them prone to seriously counter-normative patterns of reasoning or 
biases. In Section 3, we set out this pessimistic interpretation of the 
experimental results and explain the technical notion of competence that 
it invokes. We also briefly sketch the normative standard that advocates 
of the pessimistic interpretation typically employ when evaluating human 
reasoning.  This normative stance, sometimes called the Standard Picture, 
maintains that the appropriate norms for reasoning are derived from formal 
theories such as logic, probability theory and decision theory (Stein, 1996)."

Reason and Rationality
Richard Samuels
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 1904-6304

Stephen Stich
Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

and 
Luc Faucher
Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research20Group/Publications/Reason/ReasonRationality.htm