How Irrational Humans Can Still Produce Science, Progress, and Truth

Two Minds Theory, like other modern understandings of cognition and behavior, suggests that human beings are not wholly rational. I have written previously about the challenges of a scientific theory that argues people do not naturally use reason in their decision-making, and also about the ways in which a scientific community can help us to circumvent some of these challenges. Recently I wrote about how science alone can't help us in the struggle to make good policy decisions. And yet, despite all the evidence that classical Western rationality is a poor model for human behavior, I love science. How can this position be logically consistent? Is there an alternative between pure relativism and believing that people using reason have access to a single ultimate form of truth?

Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now tackles the challenge of non-rationality head-on. The book is meant as a defense of the liberal Enlightenment tradition, which was founded on the idea that people could reason their way to a better world. That idea is currently under attack from both the political right and the political left, and Pinker attempts to defend the idea of rationality against both forms of critique. The moment you try to have a conversation with someone else, Pinker says, you are signing on to the assumption that people are rational: 

Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards (Pinker, p. 8). Or, on p. 351: Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable. But that hasn't stopped a slew of irrationalists from favoring the heart over the head, the limbic system over the cortex, blinking over thinking, McCoy over Spock. ... all of these positions have a fatal flaw: They refute themselves. They deny that there can be a reason for believing those very positions. As soon as their defenders open their mouths to begin their defense, they have lost the argument, because in that very act they are tacitly committed to persuasion--to adducing reasons for what they argue, which, they insist, ought to be accepted by their listeners according to standards of rationality that they both accept. Otherwise they are wasting their breath and might as well try to convert their audience by bribery or violence.

Pinker doesn't deny findings that illustrate non-rational decision-making, like those highlighted by Two Minds Theory. His basic answer to the many demonstrations of human irrationality is as follows: 

The discovery of cognitive and emotional biases does not mean that 'humans are irrational' and so there's no point in trying to make our deliberations more rational. If humans were incapable of rationality, we could never have discovered the ways in which they were irrational, because we would have no benchmark of rationality against which to assess human judgment, and no way to carry out the assessment. Humans may be vulnerable to bias and error, but clearly not all of us all the time, or no one would ever be entitled to say that humans are vulnerable to bias and error. The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place (p. 375).

In other words, we can be rational, and it's better when we are, so we should be as often as possible. Indeed, 17 chapters of Pinker's 500+ page book are devoted to celebrating the many accomplishments of science and reason. This view is very similar to Daniel Kahneman's in Thinking, Fast and Slow: The short version of Kahneman's argument is that the Narrative mind ("System 2" in Kahneman's terms) is rational and accurate, but lazy, so it lets the Intuitive mind ("System 1") drive most of the time; and that if we could only get people to use their Narrative minds instead of their Intuitive minds, life would be vastly improved. Two Minds Theory, on the other hand, is not so optimistic. One of the core tenets of my theory is that the Intuitive mind directs behavior (always). I don't deny that people have a Narrative mind, but I have argued that this set of processes, usually described as the "executive system," could be more accurately thought of as a sports commentator calling out plays on the field.

Views like mine are challenging to traditional models of humans as rational decision-makers. Pinker reviews ways in which the political right and left have both taken aim at science and reason in recent years. The right, in particular, likes to take aim at liberal college professors who say things like this: 

If there's anything that Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to our understanding of the world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutical parsing of sacred texts" (Pinker, p. 8).

Pinker's casual assertion that many people's core values are "generators of delusion" understandably hits a sour note. Pinker's answer, rather than dialogue, is unfortunately a direct assault: 

[Conservative thought suggests] that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that if, left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie. Well, that's wrong. Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion. Good riddance. The arcs in [graphs presented in Pinker's book] show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting" (pp. 363-4).

Pinker here insists that if we are to receive the many benefits of modernity such as airplanes, cell phones, and the polio vaccine, that we must necessarily privilege reason above all other forms of thinking, and that even if not strictly required this is at least very likely to be associated with a decline in religion: "in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off" (Pinker, p. 439). Certainly Pinker himself views religious beliefs as necessarily false: "the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions and cultures -- their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies -- are factually mistaken" (p. 394). After more than 300 pages celebrating human accomplishment in various spheres, Pinker unfortunately ends his book with 43 pages devoted solely to bashing religious belief.

I think that I am fairly representing Pinker's views here, but I note that they aren't the only way to see the relationship between reason and faith. Indeed, C.S. Lewis a generation earlier used exactly the same argument as a proof for the existence of God: 

Everyone has heard people quarrelling. ... They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' 'That's my seat, I was there first.' 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm.' 'Why should you shove in first?' 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine.' 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really do against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse" (Mere Christianity, p. 3).

Like Pinker, Lewis points out that the mere fact of making an argument (as opposed to using your fists) presumes that you are reasonable, that the person you are speaking with is reasonable, and that you can agree on some commonly understood standard of behavior. But for Lewis, both the capacity for reason and the mutually understood standard of behavior (which he and many conservatives call the "moral law") are evidence of a non-material plane of reality, the realm of spirit, the "rational soul" of a human being. Because the perception of right and wrong is not subjective or individual, the argument goes, it could not come from inside our own heads. And Lewis thought that the same applied to reason itself: It is so non-personal and objective that it can only represent an ability to perceive truth outside of flawed human mental capabilities.

Unfortunately, much of contemporary right-wing politics has stopped defending the logic of belief, and has instead concentrated on simply fighting against reason itself. This attack on reason leads to the idea that people can have "alternative facts" (Kellyanne Conway, 2017), the idea that faith means declaring your belief in false things despite all evidence to the contrary, or the elevation of emotion over thinking. As an example of this counter-rational way of ordering one's life, Pinker holds up Friedrich Nietzsche: 

Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it's good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn't matter: the lives of the mass of humanity (the "botched and the bungled," the "chattering dwarves," the "flea-beetles") count for nothing. What is worthy in life is for a superman (Ubermensch, literally "overman") to transcend good and evil, exert a will to power, and achieve heroic glory. ... The feats of greatness may not consist, though, in curing disease, feeding the hungry, or bringing about peace, but rather in artistic masterworks and martial conquest. [In this view,] Western civilization has gone steadily downhill since the heyday of Homeric Greeks, Aryan warriors, helmeted Vikings, and other manly men. It has been especially corrupted by the "slave morality" of Christianity, the worship of reason by the Enlightenment, and the liberal movements of the 19th century that sought social reform and shared prosperity. Such effete sentimentality led only to decadence and degeneration. Those who have seen the truth should 'philosophize with a hammer' and give modern civilization the final shove that would bring on the redemptive cataclysm from which a new order would rise.

We can see this Nietzschean morality explicitly revealed in recent trends on the political right, such as mass shooters, January 6th rioters, or the Internet meme that "hard times create strong men and strong men create good times." This is the Ubermensch myth in new form. Nietzsche's philosophy is diametrically opposed to the ideals of the U.S. founders (Enlightenment rationalists all) and it explicitly sets itself against Christianity - for instance, Nietzsche's alternative prophet Zarathustra proclaims "he who obeys, does not listen to himself!", a dramatic departure from Christ's injunction to be "like little children." Nietzsche's views are, however, dramatically apparent in the contemporary use of the term "sheep" (a favored metaphor for followers of Jesus) to ridicule those who attempt to follow scientifically based public health guidance. To Nietzsche as well as contemporary macho-inspired conservatives, what matters most is to exert power, to set oneself above others, to not be made a fool.

The political left, on the other hand, has a different set of arguments for attacking the core Western assumption of rationality. Pinker recounts an episode in which he 

once sat through a lecture on the semantics of neuroimaging at which a historian of science deconstructed a series of dynamic 3-D multicolor images of the brain, volubly explaining how 'that ostensibly neutral and naturalizing scientific gaze encourages particular kinds of selves who are then amenable to certain political agendas, shifting position from the neuro(psychological) object toward the external observatory position,' and so on -- any explanation but the bloody obvious one, namely that the images make it easier to see what's going on in the brain. Many scholars in 'science studies' devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression (p. 396).

A second thread of the liberal critique of reason, says Pinker, consists of blaming science and rationality for crimes against humanity: 

More insidious than ferreting out ever more cryptic forms of racism and sexism is a demonization campaign that impugns science (together with reason and other Enlightenment values) for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide. This was a major theme of the influential Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School [note: the progenitor of Critical Race Theory, much maligned in the news], the quasi-Marxist movement originated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who proclaimed that the "fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." It also figures in the works of postmodernist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a 'bio-politics' that began with the Enlightenment, when science and rational governance exerted increasing power over people's lives. In a similar vein, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman blamed the Holocaust on the Enlightenment ideal to 'remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan.' In this twisted narrative, the Nazis themselves are let off the hook ('It's modernity's fault!')" (pp. 396-7).

Many scholars on the political left would agree with Pinker's critique of religion (Christianity in particular) as being complicit in the perpetration of war, slavery, oppression of women, and a host of other social ills. But they would go beyond Pinker by also throwing scientific methods and the belief in human rationality along with religious faith. In this view, reason-based social structures like courts, asylums, and medical institutions fall into the same bucket of Western cultural artifacts that have been used for purposes of oppression and must be discarded or re-made. The fact that these institutions have been used to oppress certain groups of people is unquestionable. But the argument that reason and science themselves are suspect, says Pinker, is taking things a step too far.

One important reason for people's skepticism of scientific knowledge is the historical perspective presented by Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Pinker writes that the "1962 classic is commonly interpreted as showing that science does not converge on the truth but merely busies itself with solving puzzles before flipping to some new paradigm which renders its previous theories obsolete, indeed, unintelligible." Pinker argues that our common doubt in the truth of scientific findings has real consequences for the future of humanity: 

What happens to those [students] who are taught that science is just another narrative like religion and myth, that it lurches from revolution to revolution without making progress, and that it is a rationalization of racism, sexism, and genocide? I've seen the answer: Some of them figure, 'If that's what science is, I might as well make money!' Four years later their brainpower is applied to thinking up algorithms that allow hedge funds to act on financial information a few milliseconds faster rather than to finding new treatments for Alzheimer's disease or technologies for carbon capture and storage (p. 401).

Going back to the original source here, Kuhn actually does not argue that science is merely a belief system. Instead, he writes that:

practitioners of the developed sciences are ... fundamentally problem-solvers. Though the values they deploy at times of theory-choice derive from other aspects of their work as well [i.e., from their paradigms or underlying belief systems], the demonstrated ability to set up and solve puzzles presented by nature is, in case of value conflict, the dominant criterion for most members of a scientific group. ... The behavior of a community which makes it [the search for truth] preeminent will be very different from that of one which does not. ... Considering any two such [scientific] theories, ... it should be easy to design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time. Among the most useful would be: accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved. ... Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress" (Kuhn, 1970 [2nd Edition], pp. 205-6).

Pinker is an advocate for the Enlightenment liberal tradition that identifies scientific observation as the royal road to truth. Pinker acknowledges "to be sure, science has often been pressed into the support of deplorable political movements. It is essential, of course, to understand this history, and legitimate to pass judgment on scientists for their roles in it," (p. 397). Scientists may in fact be particularly vulnerable to bad policy decisions because "many scientists are naifs when it comes to policy and law, and cook up nonstarters like world government, mandatory licensing of parents, and escaping a befouled Earth by colonizing other planets" (p. 390). Instead, Pinker says that ...

an endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from any belief that members of the occupational guild called 'science' are particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is 'that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool'" (p. 390).

In order to avoid fooling oneself, Pinker insists on free and open debate, and has actively argued against phenomena like politically correct speech and cancel culture. These positions sometimes lead to him being labeled as a neoconservative and presumably make him less popular among his liberal college faculty colleagues. A 2020 effort to oust Pinker as a distinguished fellow of the American Society of Linguistics stated that "Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes." Pinker is as willing to bash his liberal colleagues as he is to bludgeon conservatives, and clearly they don't appreciate this either. He might see himself as justified based on the fact that he has created anger on all sides.

The irony of all this controversy is that Pinker's Enlightenment Now is a deeply optimistic book. Over the course of many chapters and 75 lovely graphs, Pinker shows how humanity as a whole has made dramatic progress in the last two centuries in the areas of health, wealth, longevity, leisure time, political freedom, women's rights, financial equality, freedom from hunger, mobility, safety, democracy, literacy, global happiness, and even (surprisingly) environmental sustainability. All of these accomplishments, Pinker argues, can be laid at the feet of reason. The good scientific evidence that people are frequently irrational does not contradict this history of progress, Pinker writes:

To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the uber-rational Kant, who wrote that 'from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,' nor Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopedistes, who were cognitive and social psychologists ahead of their time. What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality? ... Often the cynicism about reason is justified with a crude version of evolutionary psychology (one not endorsed by evolutionary psychologists) in which humans think with their amygdalas, reacting instinctively to the slightest rustle in the grass which may portend a crouching tiger. But real evolutionary psychology treats humans differently: not as two-legged antelopes, but as the species that outsmarts antelopes. ... Of course, none of this contradicts the discovery that humans are vulnerable to illusions and fallacies. Our brains are limited in their capacity to process information and evolved in a world without science, scholarship, and other forms of fact-checking. But reality is a mighty selection pressure, so a species that lives by ideas must have evolved with an ability to prefer correct ones. The challenge for us today is to design an informational environment in which that ability prevails over the ones that lead us into folly" (pp. 353-5).

A few concrete suggestions on how to arrange our informational environment might be as follows: First, we should rely heavily on "the wisdom of the group" in decision-making, because each of us individually is vulnerable to make mistakes, but all of us collectively will come to conclusions that are closer to the truth. Pinker alludes to this in saying that "we can be rational collectively if not individually," and in this Two Minds Theory agrees. 

Second, we should adopt practices like double-blind peer review or the back-and-forth of courtroom argument that make it easier to get at the truth without consideration for status or authority. We should adopt conscious practices for "centering the margins" that bring in views which might not otherwise have been considered because of a group's normative assumptions. And we should rely on statistical baseline data and other Narrative-level methods suggested by Prospect Theory in order to offset our gut feelings about a situation.

Third, following an idea from Kuhn, we should tap into the puzzle-solving capabilities of the Narrative mind. Even though the Narrative mind can't direct behavior in the moment, but it is very good at logical analysis and planning when we are in a "cool" mental state and not yet confronting the moment of decision. We should use those planning states to carefully think through the optimum response, and then when we come to the moment we should avoid second-guessing ourselves based on gut feelings. Over time, our "gut feeling" may actually change, and we will habitually produce the response that the Narrative mind told us was the best. 

Fourth, if our Intuitive mind gives us feedback that the Narratively-determined strategy is not the right one, we should pause, get back to the cool state, and allow the Narrative mind to reconsider with this new information in mind. Perhaps it will tell us to redouble our efforts, but perhaps it will need to design a different strategy. Avoiding pre-commitment to a particular conclusion is another intellectual practice of scientists that can serve us well in making successful decisions. 

Finally, we should commit to the scientific belief that facts are the best teacher. This includes looking for facts that might actually disconfirm a belief system (for example, Pinker's belief that religion always leads to wars and intolerance). We should actively try to apply our Narratively-derived theories to new and difficult test cases, and revisit those theories if they don't quite fit what we observe in the world around us. This is the scientific method -- to actively seek new learning from experience. 

I will conclude this essay by pointing out that many of the suggested strategies are not based in Pinker's model of rational conversation, and that most of them do not rely on an assumption that people can set aside their Intuitive thinking to engage in wholly Narrative modes of thought. Kuhn observed that scientists aren't always swayed by reasoned arguments to change their opinions, but instead are frequently won over by factors like pre-commitment, reputation, or the aesthetics of a particular theory. But over time, Kuhn does believe (as I do) that science leads to progress and that reason is a pathway to the truth. Our own Intuitive minds are both an ally and an obstacle in that journey, as are our Narrative minds. I don't believe that human beings are rational in their behavior, or even that they could be if they wanted to. But I do have strong faith that reason and science will get us where we want to go.