I thought this would be a great link for the people here to digest (including myself) because I didn’t know about this before I came across it the other day.
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
(View the 2nd video) Decieving images with george lakoff
It’s quite long (about an hour) but do post your comments, because if we have an incorrect view of ourselves as being “rational” then that has implications for how we understand how we think about things.
Time to get rid of voting and the government then.
As a linguist, Lakoff has been severely beaten by the rationalist Chomsky since the late 1960’s. Lakoff now shills for the Democratic party. At least Chomsky, socialist and all, doesn’t sink to that level of intellectual corruption.
The Enlightenment hardly has a monopoly on conceptions of rationality. Aristotle, after all, famously defined man as a rational animal. The Enlightenment got some things right, but also got some things wrong - such as the false rationalist/empiricist dichotomy.
But what is rationality, can we distinguish rationality from non rationality? i.e. can each individual universally understand anothers point of view? or is there a gap somewhere where two things can be true but they are expressed differently (i.e. different aspects of the same thing).
What is rationality, how would you (or anyone of us) define it?
Consider George boole for instance:
"Boole’s system (detailed in his ‘An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities’, 1854) was based on a binary approach, processing only two objects - the yes-no, true-false, on-off, zero-one approach.
Surprisingly, given his standing in the academic community, Boole’s idea was either criticized or completely ignored by the majority of his peers. Luckily, American logician Charles Sanders Peirce was more open-minded."
So yes there is plenty of people ignored and criticized by intellectual power houses, and the powerhoues end up being totally irrational. Mr Boole’s ideas were absolutely critical for the development of electronic computers when Claude Shannon picked them up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
It seems to me human beings do not have a universal power to recognize rationality IMHO, and that would lead to serious problems, that means that you, I and everyone on the planet, someone could be completely and totally rational but we don’t possess a univeral ability to distinguish who and what is logical from what is not logic, and this would have serious implications for science and economic theory as a whole.