Cue for noticing rationalization: In a live conversation, I notice that the time it takes to give the justification for a conclusion when prompted far exceeds the time it took to generate the conclusion to begin with.
That is nearly always true, not just when a person is rationalizing. If you are correctly performing incremental updates of your beliefs, going back and articulating what caused your beliefs you be what they currently are is time consuming, and sometimes not possible, except by careful reconstruction.
I personally rarely find that to be evidence of rationalization; instead it generally means that I know various disjunctive supporting arguments but am loth to present any individual one for fear of it being interpreted as my only or strongest argument.
Cue for noticing rationalization: In a live conversation, I notice that the time it takes to give the justification for a conclusion when prompted far exceeds the time it took to generate the conclusion to begin with.
That is nearly always true, not just when a person is rationalizing. If you are correctly performing incremental updates of your beliefs, going back and articulating what caused your beliefs you be what they currently are is time consuming, and sometimes not possible, except by careful reconstruction.
I personally rarely find that to be evidence of rationalization; instead it generally means that I know various disjunctive supporting arguments but am loth to present any individual one for fear of it being interpreted as my only or strongest argument.