Alright. That brings me back to his definition of rationality, though. A lot of definitions would say a decision making process that consistently gives good results is rational by definition.
According to one of his articles, Pinker defines rationality as “the use of knowledge to attain goals. It has a normative dimension, namely how an agent ought to reason in order to attain some goal…” (Britannica).
It’s safe to say through his employment of the term “normative” Pinker perceives the resolution of major problems in absolutes. There is one right answer and its opposite is wrong, and there is only one way to arrive at the right answer and this is through so-called “reason”, which if you read Pinker’s works you’d quickly understand that only his way of thinking constitutes “reason” (I posted a shortened version of my review on of his books on this site btw). To refer back to the author, “It’s a perfectly safe assumption in GCSE maths or physics when the opposite of a right idea is wrong. But in major questions, the opposite of a good idea may be another good idea.”
This is in principal a hit on Pinker’s scientific reductionism which more often than not fails to accomodate real life problems that aren’t in a vaccum.
Alright. That brings me back to his definition of rationality, though. A lot of definitions would say a decision making process that consistently gives good results is rational by definition.
According to one of his articles, Pinker defines rationality as “the use of knowledge to attain goals. It has a normative dimension, namely how an agent ought to reason in order to attain some goal…” (Britannica).
It’s safe to say through his employment of the term “normative” Pinker perceives the resolution of major problems in absolutes. There is one right answer and its opposite is wrong, and there is only one way to arrive at the right answer and this is through so-called “reason”, which if you read Pinker’s works you’d quickly understand that only his way of thinking constitutes “reason” (I posted a shortened version of my review on of his books on this site btw). To refer back to the author, “It’s a perfectly safe assumption in GCSE maths or physics when the opposite of a right idea is wrong. But in major questions, the opposite of a good idea may be another good idea.”
This is in principal a hit on Pinker’s scientific reductionism which more often than not fails to accomodate real life problems that aren’t in a vaccum.