Is Rationality Always Instrumental?

Subcultures notoriously like to cast themselves in the role of exemplars of rationality and outsiders as cast out by their "irrationality" -- as the murderous machineries of racism daily attest -- and technocentric subcultures (engineers, coders, geeks, whatever) are surely not much less prone to this sort of thing than anybody else is, as perhaps Snow's "Two Cultures" reminds us best.

Given the amount of guff I receive from some of my commentors about my fashionable nonsensicality, my effeteness, eliteness, and aestheteness, and so on, it is weird to admit that I actually think of myself as something of a hokey defender of rationality. And so, when I teach critical thinking, close reading, and argument to undergraduates I actually have in mind that I am helping my students become better democratic citizens, helping them to protect themselves against the marketing misinformation of corporations and politicians, providing them with tools to help them adjudicate difficult disputes and so on.

But it does seem to me that people practice rationality in multiple dimensions or modes in their lives -- in my own account instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes (and I'm sure even more multivalent accounts are available) -- and that no one mode is more dispensable than the others, no one mode more supreme than the others, except on a case by case basis. On this account, rationality consists not only of affirming beliefs only when the conditions for warranted assertability for the relevant mode are met, but also recognizing just which mode of rationality is the apt one given one's context.

When some technocentrics seem to decide in advance that science is the one and only paradigmatic practice of rationality, and that a truly rational person will manage to shoehorn every proper belief-ascription into something that at any rate superficially passes for proper scientific form, it becomes enormously difficult to direct their attention to any detail at all that can't be reduced to conventionally instrumental terms (as the sacrifices we make for the legibility of belonging often cannot be, as an idiosyncratic assertion that a thing is beautiful often cannot be, as the faith that we will risk disadvantage in an effort at reconciliation with those to whom we seem irreconcilable for now often cannot be, and so on), and one finds oneself accused of emotionalism, irrationality, relativism, and who knows what else when one makes the effort at all.

Of course, from my own perspective, it is exactly as irrational and exactly as destructive to the proper practice and status of science to try to tear and stretch it to accommodate dimensions of human experience to which it is not well suited, as it would be to deny its indispensability in matters of prediction and control. What is curious to me is that those who would make of science a kind of godly summit, end-all, be-all (with themselves as its Priestly mouthpieces more often than not) are precisely the ones who claim their clumsy hyperbole amounts to a Championing of Science, while even technoscientifically literate advocates for a more modest accounting of science's role in the practical fabric of rationality and sociability are often pilloried by such Champions for their irrationality.

What it is key to understand here is that this does not look to me like an equivalent exchange: It is not just that the Scientist decries the Humanist's irrationality (think of logical positivism pooh-poohing the lack of philosophical "progress" -- as if this category necessarily applies to the project of philosophy as a valuable enterprise -- or distinguishing the content of fact from the "emotivism" of value), then the Humanist turns about and decries the Scientist's irrationality for good measure (pointing out that science lacks the conceptual resources to answer the question should an experiment be done? should an outcome be pursued among others? and so on).

The reason this is not as equivalent an exchange of charges as it might initially seem is because it seems to me that scientific rationality is easily affirmed and championed by those who might affirm and champion nonetheless other available modes of rationality as more apt to our circumstances. If I am right to say that we rationally affirm instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs; and if I am right to say that these beliefs are warranted according to different practices and yield different edifications; then there is a great difference between the position of one who would deny the existence of all but one of these modes or denigrate all but one of these modes or subsume all these modes under just one of them in the name of rationality, and the position of one who would affirm the different value and dignity of them all in their proper measure in the name of rationality, including the mode valorized by the reductionist position.

The one who demands exclusion and reduction in the name of purity and optimality is making a radically different sort of argument than the one who pleas for inclusion and expansion in the name of diversity and consent. It is profoundly misleading to equate these two positions, whatever their superficial symmetry.

Let me be clear, I am not just claiming that there is a place for morals, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, in a world that properly respects scientific rationality, I am saying that all of these are modes of rationality -- if the warrants that differently govern the assertability of moral or aesthetic beliefs are not matters of rationality (if they are matters of, say, propriety, instead), then exactly the same thing applies in my view to the warrants that govern assertability in matters of instrumental belief. And let me be even clearer still, I do absolutely agree that the criteria for warranted assertability hacked out over centuries of scientific practice -- falsifiability, testing, publication, coherence, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on -- do indeed provide a marvelous, incomparable institutional recourse for acquiring good beliefs concerning matters of prediction and control.

Looking to the Scientist to provide guidance in matters for which she is no more qualified than anybody else, one citizen among citizens, one peer among peers, one organism among organisms, has nothing to do with science. Going from there to invest the idealized figure of the Scientist or of his Works with hyperbolic or even transcendental significances has nothing to do with science either.