RATIONALITY

Presented by: Michelle H. Cojo

Own philosophy of education: progressivism
• “All men are rational”
• Rationality is a uniquely human capacity, as far as we know; our
ability to understand and control our world is of a different order from
that of other animals and machines and is an essential part of what it
is to be human.
• Aristotle- who first defined man as a rational animal, and he meant by
this that man was to be distinguished from other animals in that he
had the ability to think, calculate or reason.
• Aristotle defined human beings as rational animals.
• Animals can respond to stimulus in the environment, they may be
conditioned to respond to signals but what animals cannot do is act
purposively.
• Man differs from other animals in that he is able to act purposively, to
plan, choose ends and adopt means, and in that he is able to control
his environment rather than simply respond to it. He is able to
memorize, to imagine, foresee, to predict, to hypothesize.\
• Man has the capacity to think.
• But the fact that all men have the capacity to think does not mean
that all men are equally good at thinking,
• For people- talk of aiming to promote rationality to make people
rational, they mean that they want people to think well.
• But if rationality is understood as good thinking and irrationality as
bad thinking, the question is: how to distinguish between good and
bad thinking?
• And one can still do it well or badly. It seems quite clear that
rationality and irrationality can be displayed in both theoretical and
practical reasoning.
• We call a man rational or irrational in respect of the quality of this thinking
when he thinks and in whatever sphere he thinks.
• If a man’s rationality is to be judged by reference to the quality of his
thinking in some sense, it may be suggested that being rational is to be
identified with being right.
• A rational argument would thus be one that leads to the correct conclusion,
or the right answer, and rational behaviour would be behavior that was right.
• But if we were to accept this view of rationality as good thinking in the sense
of ‘thinking that comes up with the right answers’, there would not be a
great deal of point in talking about the promotion of rationality as an aim of
education.
• If ‘being rational’ meant ‘being right’, then, in practice, aiming to
make people rational would mean aiming to make them think in the
way we do, so that they arrived at the answers of which we approve.
• ---This is certainly not what those who advocate the promotion of
rationality have in mind.
Example:
It makes perfectly good sense to describe somebody’s argument as
rational, even if we do not happen to agree with the conclusion of the
argument or if we are unsure as to whether the conclusion is
acceptable to us or not.
• These considerations indicate that a rational argument is not an
argument that ends with the right answer. To describe an argument as
rational is to say something about the process of reasoning involved
in it.
• -an argument is rational if the chain of reasoning from premises to
conclusion is valid.
• Even if the argument is rational, conclusion may be false or unproven.
Same way as even if conlusion is true or correct but then the
argument is irrational and the reasoning does not lead to conclusion.
rational argument- the one that proceeds logically, that is to say in
which each step of the argument as given does indeed follow from the
preceding step, and in which the reasons that are used to move from
the premises to the conclusion are good reasons.

Argument may fall short of being rational

-it may refuse to take account of pertinent evidence that would upset
it; it may lay stress on irrelevant evidence; it may appeal to emotion
rather than reason; it may contain contradictions and inconsistencies;
or it may contain illogical steps
• Example- hatred and jealousy which has no recognizable reason or
proper ground will be considered as irrational
rational behaviour
- behaviour may be rational either in the sense that he has a rational
account to give of why he is behaving in this way or in the sense that
we feel that it possible to give such an account, despite the fact that
the agent acted without conscious reflection.
- it must be explicable in terms of good reasons. Irrational behaviour is
behaviour for which there is no good reason.
• For example- it is irrational to beat up your wife because you lose your job. it is irrational in that the fact of your
losing your job does not in itself constitute a relevant reason for beating up your wife.
• example- you beat up your wife because she is unfaithful. it may not be good/unreasonable, but we cannot tell that your
behavior is irrational
• it involves reference to a reason that is recognizable as a reason; it is the right kind of reason
• Unreasonable - absence of further information about the situation, the reason you produce for holding it looks weak.

example- you beat up your wife because she has failed to do the washing-up. is it irrational or unreasonable?

• paranoiac- we mayn think they are irrational but surely, given his way of looking at things, his behaviour may be entirely
rational.
• Cynics- claims that we call people who agree with us ‘rational’ and
people who disagree with us ‘irrational
- it is not only that we sometimes do not know the premises on
which another man bases his behaviour, but very often we know another
person’s premises but do not share them.

• - Naturally we tend to use the word ‘rational’ to describe people who

see things in a similar way to that in which we see them
• - Furthermore it is probably true that as a matter of fact the term
‘rational’ has emotive overtones and that one part of what one is doing
in describing a person as rational is indicating approval of that person
• -to judge whether a man is being rational we have to know what
his premises are as well as observe his behaviour or listen to
his arguments. For it is only in the light of premises that we can
assess reasons as good or relevant reasons.

• -sometimes difficult to know whether a person’s behaviour is

rational or not, when one is in ignorance of the assumptions on
which that behaviour is based
Example - If I am very anxious to become a doctor, work hard for my
medical exams and then fail to turn up to take them, the prima facie I
am being irrational.
- If there was no good reason to refuse to the exam (being ill) then
failing to turn up is being irrational.
• a rational man (as opposed to a rational argument or rational
behaviour considered in isolation), being a conscious creature, must
surely be one who has respect for the idea of giving good reasons.
- man may adopt an idiosyncratic point of view, but, if he is a rational
man, he must at least be the sort of person who attempts to produce
reasons for that point of view and who takes notes of arguments
against it.
Rationality as an Educational Aim
- the aim of promoting rationality is not the same thing as promoting
commitment to those opinions and judgements that we regard as
rational.
- In fact to set up rationality as one of one’s educational aims is
automatically to oppose the practice of educating children in such a
way that, as adults, they become unreflective individuals who act and
think in response to the dictates of authority figures.
- This is not to say that the aim is to deter people from taking any
notice of what experts or authorities in any particular sphere may
have to say.
- It would presumably be foolish for most of us to ignore as a matter of
policy what authorities, in the sense of experts, have to say in various
spheres. In general we should be well advised to take note of what
the doctor, being an authority in medicine, has to say about our
health, for instance (although even here it has to be remembered that
authorities in a particular sphere often disagree and the mere fact
that somebody is an authority does not automatically make him
right).
The object of stressing rationality as an educational aim is to attempt
to do away with the tendency of children to assume that something
must be true, or right or good because teacher says so, and of adults to
make similar assumptions because the party leader, the newspaper
editor or the vicar says so.
• This aim invites two further questions: How does one do it? Why
should one be concerned to do it? The former is largely an empirical
question, depending for its answer on the collection of evidence as to
what effect various practices actually have. But there are one or two
points that follow logically from the analysis of the concept.
rational man is, by definition, one who approaches matters with a concern and an ability to
assess them by means of relevant reasoning, he needs ideally to have, besides this disposition
to be concerned, understanding of the type of reasons that are relevant in various logically
distinct areas, at least a certain amount of information, an ability to conceive of alternative
ways of looking at things besides that with which he is familiar, and a questioning attitude.
- if the man is rational, he will regard the suggestion as up for questioning.
- He will neither oppose it simply because it is new to him or unfamiliar nor approve it
automatically because it is advocated by people whom he happens to respect.
- He will want to examine the issue and to examine it on its own merits. But in order to do
that he will need to have or to acquire certain information – information, broadly speaking,
about child psychology, sociological factors,
- One mark of the rational man will be that his judgement on the issue will be more tentative
in proportion to the degree in which he lacks such information.
radical educationalists such as Postman and Weingartner, who in their
Teaching as a Subversive Activity demand that we throw away the
notion that we (the teachers) know best and know what things are
worth doing, and instead throw everything open to the children’s
questioning and in this way teach ‘the most important and intellectual
ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking
questions’.
to promote rationality
- we shall also have to see to it that children acquire information, acquire
knowledge as to what sort of information is appropriate to what sort of
question and how one sets about dealing with different kinds of
question, and, above all, acquire the formal notion that there is a
distinction to be made between good or relevant and weak or irrelevant
reasons.
- teacher shall make some positive effort to discriminate between
children’s responses and opinions as relatively coherent or incoherent,
to provide information, and to initiate children into at least some of the
various forms of knowledge.
• To deny the value of rationality is to do away with the importance of
man’s distinctive capacity for purposive action. To do away with the
distinction between good and bad thinking is to deny the purpose of
thinking.