Can I suggest a moratorium on the use of the phrase “Art of rationality”? There are some serious language issues among this community that I believe may be clotting people’s thought processes. The above post talks about developing “x-rationality” almost as something entirely parallel to science and mathematics, an entirely new field with limitless horizons. This might make sense if we conceive of rationality as the sort of thing one can possibly develop an art or science of. But I’m not sure this isn’t a category error, much like the phrase “the Art of breathing” or the “Science of walking” would be. Has anyone shown that rationality is the sort of thing we can successively build upon, generation after generation? (Note that it’s very important here to distinguish between advances in formalizations of rationality and advances in rationality itself.) We should iron these conceptual issues out, or at the very least, minimize the rhetorical flourishes for a bit.
Can I suggest a moratorium on the use of the phrase “Art of rationality”? There are some serious language issues among this community that I believe may be clotting people’s thought processes. The above post talks about developing “x-rationality” almost as something entirely parallel to science and mathematics, an entirely new field with limitless horizons. This might make sense if we conceive of rationality as the sort of thing one can possibly develop an art or science of. But I’m not sure this isn’t a category error, much like the phrase “the Art of breathing” or the “Science of walking” would be. Has anyone shown that rationality is the sort of thing we can successively build upon, generation after generation? (Note that it’s very important here to distinguish between advances in formalizations of rationality and advances in rationality itself.) We should iron these conceptual issues out, or at the very least, minimize the rhetorical flourishes for a bit.