7 - The rational and the real
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
However the honours are finally shared between active and passive, we have asserted the existence of a domain of rules, intentions and reasons and of actors who try to do the rational thing. But we must not assert in ontology what, as epistemologists, we could not possibly know to be true. It is time to pay our epistemological debts by honouring those promissory notes on the bank of Reason.
The debts will be paid with a defence of rationalism. So let it be clear that rationalism has three distinct senses. The blandest is marked by a broad belief that there is the sort of order in experience which makes science possible. J. S. Mill was once described as ‘the high priest of rationalism’ in this sense, without impugning his robust empiricism. It would be a motley alliance got by lumping together all who thought science possible and their disagreements about the kind of order required would be more instructive than their agreement on the fact of order. Only sceptics, romantics, mystics and a few other champions of the random, the fragmentary, the spontaneous and the ineffable would be debarred. But I mention this sense of rationalism not from mere nostalgia for the rationalist societies who used to sneer at the Trinity in damp, gaslit halls. There is also a present danger in radical critiques of orthodox social science, in the heady relativism brought on by intoxication with paradigms and in recent fulminations against method.
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- Models of ManPhilosophical Thoughts on Social Action, pp. 143 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977