The Rationality Pages
The short essays in this section are intended as an introduction to the rational method of inquiry utilized in philosophy and in the sciences. The term “rational” has a couple of different senses in everyday discourse. It will help to distinguish a couple of these at the outset.
Sometimes we refer to people as irrational if they are prone to relatively dramatic emotional swings or rational if they are relatively calm and even keeled. One’s emotional tendencies are not really what is at issue in exercising the rational method. However, it does seem to be a fact about human psychology that being emotionally upset significantly diminishes our capacity for exercising the rational method of inquiry. So directly after a falling out with your boyfriend or girlfriend is probably not the best time to study philosophy. So be kind and clear headed.
Economists speak of people as rational when they act in ways that are most likely to maximize their own interests. Rationality in this sense is called practical or prudential rationality. Rationality in the practical sense is concerned with the relation between the beliefs and desires of a person and the actions he or she performs. The rational method of inquiry is concerned with how we come to hold beliefs, not how we act on them once we have them. So rationality in the practical sense also is not what we will be concerned with here.
The rational method of inquiry is concerned with one’s grounds for believing. We can refer to this as the epistemic sense of rationality. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with knowledge, rational belief and justification. To be rational in this epistemic sense is roughly to believe in accordance with the best reasons available. An argument, as we use the term in philosophy, is just a reason for believing something (it’s not a dispute). People that are rational in the epistemic sense are persuaded by good arguments, but are not easily swayed by poor or fallacious arguments.
To understand what it is to be rational in the epistemic sense is to understand the difference between good arguments and poor arguments. The pages linked below will introduce you to the main types of argument and the basic methods for evaluating arguments of these types as good ones or bad ones.
A Quartet of Hypothetical Syllogisms