http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584631.html
This is the kind of discussion that a Newly Minted Peircean, such as myself, should be all over, but I find myself oddly (thankfully?) reticient. My intuition tells me that all thinking is rational – it’s just that most of it is weak or founded on truly crazy premises. Among valid inferences, Peirce made a distinction between strong inferences (All ravens are black, this bird is a raven, this bird is black) and weak ones such as “this bird is a raven, this bird is black, all ravens are black” (induction) and “this bird is black, all ravens are black, this bird is a raven”(abduction). But he regarded all three as valid forms of inference. In this spirit, I might argue that right wing thinking is not irrational, but exceedingly weak. But we should beware of falling for the syllogism, “This guy is wrong, all right-wingers are wrong, this guy is a right winger” which is valid, but horribly weak.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 12:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "rational"
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:41 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:
Now, that carries us to how/whether/why humans would use irrational
inference procedures. But I think we would _need_ some evidence that
people actually use irrational reasoning procedures. I think even
so-called "irrational" things like _emotions_ are, somewhere deep down,
rational. Those emotions are an evolutionarily selected decision-making
ability that has its own calculus.
Bob Altemeyer's research on right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities -- pdf at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ -- finds that high scoring RWAs suffer from severe cognitive disabilities which essentially render them immune to reason. (Note that "right-wing" here is a technical term meaning "adherent of the status quo".)
But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence
of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning,
highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a
profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it
unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.
Just because there is a reason to be a lynch mob doesn't make a lynch mob reasonable. I think you're confounding the rationality of explanation with the rationality of the explained.
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College