Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 15:24:20 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: More on Modernism, Reason and Myth



Busy as I am I cannot respond at length to Leo's post. A few
misconceptions about my position and the nature of rational choice theory
should be cleared up however.

1. I'm not a member of the rational choice crowd, even the rational choice
Marxists. I think RCT has a limited scope and can illuminate certain
problems in social theory. But as a general social theory with universal
pretensions, it's a an arrogrant flop.

2. RCT is not a theory of rationality. It is a set of mathematical tools
that enables us to derive results about the behavior of idealized actors
with certain motivations. Among these are motivations that are called
"rational" by stipulation, but even in RCT there is not a unified or
coherent set of such motivations. For example, while RCT say that where we
know the probablities the "rational actor" maximizes expected utility (bu
definition), where don't know the probabilities og the outcomes and so
can't do there there is no settled agreement on what the "rational actor".

3. The applicability the postulates of RCT to real people, who do not
realize them in fact, is a delicate and difficult matter.

4. RCT does not purport to be a theory of epistemic rationality (what is
rational to believe) or, outside the effoirts of a certain persistent
school of philosophers like David Gauthier, a theory of ethical
rationality (what it is ratiuonal to aspire to). 

5. What I mean by rationality in my previous defense of reason vs.
rhetoric is not RCT-rationality, but the practice of giving reasons for
one's beliefs and actions in accord with whatever standards we have for
what count as good reasons. This has nothing to do with RCT per se.
Something might be RCT ratioanl and still a bad reason by standards it is
rational to accept.

6. I certainly have no problem with the idea of hermeneutic horizons, to
use Leo's languange. We do not and cannot have a view from nowhere. We
cannot escape some set of prejudices or other. Some of these may be
defective, leading us away from the truth. Others may be what Leo calls
enabling, leading us towards it. But I do not see "enlightenment" or
"emancipation" or "objectivity" as a matter of freedom from prejuduce and
approximation of the view from nowhere.Nor do I regard standards of
rationality as outside our sets of prejudices or horizins, whatever you
want to call them. In fact, they partyly consistent these prejudices and
horizons. None of this means that we are stuck with them in the sense that
we cannot develop them into other standards and other sets of horizons,
perhaps wider and more satisfactory ones.

7. I am happy to accept the Hegelian label in that I believe in
progress--noninevitable, historically contingent, reversable, but in the
long run real. I have argued this long ago on M1. We could talk about it
again. But without going into the theory too much, I think we know more
about what's true and right than our distant ancestors did. We have
quantum mechanics. Its advantage over the story of Gilgamesh is that it's
probbaly true. We know, as the Babylonians did not, that slavery is
intolerable. None of this is intentended to deny that we often act like
brutes, but even then we have a wider conception of what that meand than
the Babylonians did.

--Justin




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