Demosthenes

I've been reading up about objectivism and other philosophy that enspouse the notion that human creature are inherently rational and capable to using reason to explore the universe.

Hence the question, humans may be capable of using reason, but are they inherently rational?

I'd say no, in the vast majority of my experience with the humanity and myself, I find that we are all emotional, and irrational creatures. Reason is something we all have to learn in our lives, how to perfect it, and use it correctly. We didn't just spring from the womb knowing how to reason, we had to learn it from our parents, in a school environment, and practice practice practice using it. And that's just assuming that we recieve an optimal education. There are plenty of people who are woefully lacking in rational capability and there are even those who have managed to sabotage their reasoning skills, which an article in The Skeptic magazine discusses about at length.

Rationality isn't something that comes naturally, we have to learn it. Irrational people far outnumber the rational people and even rational people are irrational on occassion. So why do all of the rational philosophies, including objectivism keep cranking out "men are inherently rational" statements when face of evidence that indicates otherwise.

Fine with me if there are moral frameworks that promotes and support rationality, in my opinion, that's a wonderful thing and the only way to keep the wall of ignorance from dominating our lives. But why keep engaging in what appears to be a clear false-hood?

Primal

Are you saying that human beings do not excercise reason daily? That's nonsense. People solve problems in their life all the time using reason and evidence implicitly. When you wake up do you drink gasoline or orange juice? You drink orange juice because you have employed basic reasoning skills. When you are typing on your computer you are reasoning, with this article you are as well. When a person hops in his car and activates it via key instead of just trying to drive without it: again some basic reasoning. When we by stuff we calculate how much we can buy and how much money we have: again reasoning. Humans are also cause infering, does the fact that we get this wrong mean that we aren't? Does the fact that some people may not care about what any cause is mean that human beings are not cause inferring animals?You cannot use the fact that some people's reasoning leads them astray or that some people fail to excercise their reason to try and prove that humans are inherently irrational or nonrational. The use of reason, some basic reasoning processes every day, is too much of a given to defend that statement.

Demosthenes

alas but those reasoning skills had to be learned in life, they weren't innate skills. We all have the capability to learn so we acquire the necessary skills to reason correctly.

I can take that statement and make a contrapositive from it, you cannot also use the fact that some people are good at reasoning and excercise it all the time to prove that humans are inherently rational either.

hinduwoman

Jonathan Swift put it succintly, human beings are not rational animals. They are capable of reason, that is all.
The major part of our minds is dominated by emotion.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Reason and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The choice is not to be either emotional or rational, but to be fully human--to have the proper emotions at the proper times for the right reasons.

Rational people are not unemotional 'Vulcans', but their emotions do not happen 'for no reason', unbidden and beyond comprehension.

I agree that most people seem to be irrational most of the time. But, I also believe that most people could choose to exercise reason, but they don't.

I don't believe that we are inherently rational or inherently irrational. I believe that we are each inherently volitional, and the only question is what will we each choose to be?

And why?

Keith.

hinduwoman

Perhaps whether we use reason or emotion is due to our early training? If we are taught to apply critical thinking, then we would turn to reason when confronting problems. Otherwise we allow our emotions to take control.
I agree that we need both reason and emotion, but too much emotion just stops the brain.

Buddrow_Wilson

in most cases you must take emotions into account to come to a rational conclusion.

Kachana

I find the opening post too vaguely stated; what exactly do you mean that humans are not inherently rational? That they do not use complex logical deductions all (most?) of the time? That they do not use simple rational procedures all (most?) of the time? And which opearations in particular are we talking about here?

Of course, every day every (non brain-damaged) humans use rational procedures in coming to conclusions, and these processes largely do not have to be learnt. For instance, rationally generalising from a sequence of events to isolate the important event common to all the preceding events; Humans (even very young) are incredibly good at this, machines and animals are much much worse. For instance, humans can watch someone washing plates and quickly reason that they are doing so to clean food from the plate. Chimps can't, they will copy the actions without inferring the intent, leaving the plates dirty, and even washing clean plates. For a machine to infer simple tasks like this is also incredibly difficult as AI researchers have discovered, connectionists networks with no built in modules capable of assigning variables and other logical operations perform very poorly at such reasoning tasks. We are also very good at reasoning about drawing conclusions about other people's intentions and this ability tends to appear in children at the same time, training or not. Language is another domain in which we reason "innately" to derive conclusions to of syntax that we apply to new words.

There is even evidence that animals as lowly as rats and pigeons can reason. Rats, given the syllogism "A implies B; B implies C" can infer that A implies C.

But as to whether people tend to think logically about complex topics in real life, that's another question, and certainly many people do draw irrational conclusions a lot of the time. You only need to watch politicians on TV for a bout 5 minutes to hear a logical fallacy of some description. And I would say that a lot of the time, when people's emotions draw them to one conlcusion, the will creatively reason to that conclusion, often without even realising that they are doing so. For instance, by concentrating on one single aspect of a problem that supports their view, or repeating a popular soundbyte in a group, and ignoring the other factors that pertain to the conclusion.

99Percent

Humans are essencially rational. Its our distinguishing characteristics from animals and machines.

Reason is our way of survival. For better of for worse we cannot depend on our instincts to survive. In fact reason is our in born ability. We must learn the tricks of survival from our parents and older people using language and example.

tronvillain

I would have to say that people are inherently rational, but perhaps I do not mean the same thing by "rational" as does Demosthenes. There is no conflict between reason and emotion - emotion informs reason, providing the basis for decision making.