00:00:00.000 There is a fashion at the moment, there has been for a number of years, for writing books
00:00:09.700 about the mind and about thinking and about rationality which whose main theme is to denigrate
00:00:17.780 human beings and denigrate them for being irrational is basically what it amounts to.
00:00:26.460 It begins with the fact that they have some misconceptions about what rationality is or what
00:00:33.760 So there is Bayesianism and the atheist movement and that kind of thing which has a hold
00:00:42.480 on something that is connected with rationality but it is not the whole story and it
00:00:48.680 misconstrues rationality, for example by concentrating on explicit theories, explicit ideas
00:00:59.800 and ignoring in explicit ones or denigrating in explicit ones.
00:01:04.240 As a result, they would be mistaken even if they had the right theory of rationality
00:01:09.920 namely Poppers or augmented with my footnotes but even if they had the right theory of rationality
00:01:18.360 it is supposing there was a popularian movement based on some book saying how important
00:01:29.880 Poppers epistemology is and deducing all sorts of things like what political party to
00:01:34.960 vote for, how to order your life and suppose that it was based on the right epistemology,
00:01:45.800 the true epistemology, if it were framed as a critique of most humans, if it were framed
00:01:55.920 as an us and them thing where we are the people who understand Popper and they are the
00:02:02.000 people who don't and therefore we are actually really the only ones who are entitled
00:02:07.840 to make political decisions, we are always right in a dispute with somebody who isn't
00:02:18.120 If it were framed in that way then it would be a wholly bad thing even if the actual content
00:02:27.080 were true and of course in real life nobody, not even Popper, has the actual truth
00:02:34.000 and these rationality based movements don't have the actual truth either although they
00:02:41.320 all have useful fragments of the truth they have as does everyone and one can make progress
00:02:50.760 in understanding epistemology and understanding how the mind works but we are far from understanding
00:03:03.720 For example, perhaps most recently there is the so-called woke movement or political correctness
00:03:11.880 and before that there was sort of post-modernism and structuralism and so on and those
00:03:21.360 are all rejections of the enlightenment, of enlightenment values.
00:03:29.440 Some people say that they are a reversion to earlier ways of thinking with authority and
00:03:36.480 violence and so on and they do have a tendency to become authoritative and even violent but
00:03:45.280 I think they are not that, they don't want to revert to let's say an established religion
00:03:54.640 although they have in common that they and the established religion want to set up an authority
00:03:59.720 but they are unlikely in many other ways in most other ways.
00:04:05.400 What they are is a rebellion against what I have called the British Strand of the Enlightenment
00:04:12.600 although I am deeply ashamed that I didn't call this the Dutch Strand of the Enlightenment
00:04:24.640 It's proper theory that knowledge grows by conjecture and criticism that there are no sources
00:04:31.400 or authoritative sources of knowledge that it remains conjectural always.
00:04:42.400 It, for example, just to take a wild example that wasn't in my previous book.
00:04:47.760 The idea that circumstantial evidence and direct evidence are different in kind is a mistake.
00:04:58.680 All evidence is circumstantial and people can be mistaken about what they remember, they
00:05:04.720 can be mistaken about what they see, nobody can see causes anyway.
00:05:15.560 I definitely don't, so my book is some ideas about how reason works and why and what
00:05:29.000 promotes thinking that works and what impedes it.
00:05:35.680 But I don't have a formula for thinking that works.
00:05:39.240 In fact, it's part of preparing epistemology that there cannot be such a formula because
00:05:44.800 if there were, it would be a touchstone of true and false.
00:05:49.040 You could look into the origin of a theory, did it arise by this method, if so it would
00:05:59.040 Ideas have to be judged by their content, not by their source and that includes not
00:06:05.080 only who they come from, but what method they were obtained by.
00:06:12.040 So another kind of version of this wrong kind of take on rationality is evidence-based
00:06:24.200 science or evidence-based politics, as we've recently seen in where politicians claim
00:06:32.960 to have, quote, based their political decisions on the science.
00:06:41.360 And then they are criticized for not doing so, and of course it's impossible to do so.
00:06:46.080 So they're quite right not to base it on the science.
00:06:48.760 The science is a critique, all scientific thinking is critical.
00:06:55.600 One should take scientific critiques into account, but that is not the same as basing
00:07:06.080 And in any case, there are more considerations than just their science.
00:07:10.840 There's also morality, there's also politics as the art of the possible.
