Catholic Philosophy vs. Pinker on the Nature of Rationality
I recently started reading the work Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by the Harvard-based cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker has written many works on similar topics from a more general perspective. While in some of his other works, he deals with the nature of the mind and the basic mechanisms surrounding cognition, in this work Pinker deals with the nature of rationality more specifically.
While I would say that, from a Catholic perspective, there is nothing inherently theologically or philosophically problematic about Pinker’s definition of rationality, it does appear, at least for those familiar with Catholic theology and philosophy - especially as articulated in the Scholastic tradition - not so much a matter of Pinker’s definition being outright wrong, but rather a matter of him placing the emphasis in the wrong place, which leads him to develop too narrow of a definition of rationality.
Pinker defines the term “rationality” in the following manner: rationality is “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” At the beginning of his book, he shows that reason has been able to help make progress in a variety of different fields of human life, ranging from increasing life expectancy to decreasing poverty. He also uses the example of the San tribe of southern Africa, who are known for using a series of diverse problem solving skills to pick up on relatively subtle clues in their environment in order to more efficiently find animals while on the hunt. From this, Pinker can conclude, “…[R]ationality is not a power that an agent either has or doesn’t have…It is a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.”
It makes sense why Pinker would accept this vision of the nature of rationality: as a cognitive psychologist, he - like other types of psychologists, or those who study different fields, such as neurologists - is not concerned with the broader philosophical (and even theological) questions that arise from analyzing or reflecting upon the nature of the mind or consciousness, but rather with the particular processes or mechanisms by which the mind functions. In different situations, different cognitive tools under the umbrella of “reason” are being used to perform different tasks.
The problem lies primarily in this: since there are many distinct cognitive tools connected with reason, is reason/rationality merely the title we slap on to this collection of cognitive faculties, or is it something more than simply the sum total of all these specific or individual cognitive tools, something deeper which makes their existence possible?
Pinker, in a word, misses the forest for the trees. In the traditional Scholastic definition, reason is another term for the intellect. The intellect is that whereby we engage in an act of abstraction, deriving from our knowledge of sensible things an understanding of the basic metaphysical and logical principles that govern it. It is that by which, at least for beings with bodies, we see past the sensible and comprehend the purely intelligible that governs, orders, or arranges it.
Fr. Bernard J. Wuellner, S.J., in his Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, defines reason as “the intellect in its reasoning function.” Reasoning is an operation of the intellect; nonetheless, it is such an essential operation of the intellect, that Wuellner goes on to define reason as “a name for the intellect.” The term “reason” can be used to refer to the intellect, or, more specifically, to the intellect when in the act of reasoning. This definition, to some extent, is still a roundabout description. On some level, it makes sense: Scholastics, when defining a word, are known for beginning with broad, vague, or generic descriptions or definitions, which they then nuance and narrow. These broader definitions are meant to create the framework for further investigation.
In the Scholastic view, reason or rationality is not merely a group of cognitive tools; rather, it is a faculty rooted in the intellect. The intellect, Wuellner writes, is “the power of knowing in an immaterial way.” The intellect, he specifies, is that which allows for a form of knowing that goes beyond the senses and those cognitive powers immediately connected with them, including the imagination; it allows us to understand the essence of a thing, to comprehend meaning and the first principles of logical thought or demonstration. None of these things are immediately perceived in comprehending physical things, though physical things may instantiate them. Thus, the intellect, in comprehending these things, must abstract them from matter. When we see a material thing, we ask, “Why is it the way it is?”, and the father down the rabbit hole we go, the more we see ourselves going through this process of deducing from our knowledge of material things a knowledge of purely intelligible and universal truths.
This understanding of the intellect is important in the writings of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., one of the best-known Neo-Scholastic theologians of the Francophone world. In volume 1 of one of work God, His Existence, and His Nature (one of his more significant works in religious epistemology), he criticizes the Empiricists for collapsing the intellect into the senses. What we know of a thing through the intellect is not a sensible perception of some physical quality, nor a composite image derived from seeing a series of distinct versions of a thing; rather, it is an understanding of the basic metaphysical or ontological principles that govern a thing.
With this understanding in mind (no pun intended) of what constitutes the epistemic foundation of reason, we have to ask, “What exactly is the intellect doing when it reasons?” Going back to Wuellner, he notes how the Latin word from which we derive the word “rational” - rationis - refers to the essence or nature of a thing, the ground or ultimate explanation of a thing, its formal principle. It is, in a word, that which gives a thing intelligibility. Thus, when the intellect comes to understand a thing, it makes judgments about it. Reason, in a word, is that whereby the intellect draws conclusions about a thing, or, more broadly, it refers to the ground on which we affirm something as reasonable, true, or probable. It is the epistemic and logical ground of evidence and arguments, that which makes possible discursive reasoning.
The major difference between Pinker’s definition and the general definition accepted by most Scholastics is that Pinker sees reason as a means of facilitating action, whereas for the Scholastics it is primarily a means of knowing. This is not to imply that we can create an overly-sharp contrast between action and knowledge: we can only act if we are drawn to a specific goal, but we can only feel drawn to that goal if we are aware of it, and if we are aware of the various means by which to attain it; therefore, since we can only strive towards those ends that we are aware of, what we are capable of knowing, and how we are capable of knowing, determines the sorts of actions we are capable of. (It is for this reason that a lot of Scholastics maintain a close relationship between reason and free will, and even, to some degree, see free will as an operation of the rational faculty.) Nonetheless, while each type of knowledge includes or makes possible a certain type of action, the various types of knowledge are not merely ways of calculating how to obtain an end; rather, action is something that results from having a specific type of knowledge.
Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, notes that “the object of the intellect is the very idea of appetible good” (Summa Theologiæ I, Q. 82, A. 3, respondeo). That is to say, the appetitive faculty is that whereby man desires some good, and the intellect is that whereby we develop the idea of the object of our appetite. As Aquinas further specifies in De Veritate Question 3, Article 3, respondeo,
As Augustine says if we consider the proper meaning of the word itself, an idea is a form; but if we consider what the thing itself is, then an idea is an intelligible character or likeness of a thing. We find, moreover, in certain forms, a double relation: one relation to that which is informed by these forms, and this is the kind of relation that knowledge has to the knower; another to that which is outside, and this is the kind of a relation that knowledge has to what is known. This latter relationship, however, is not common to all forms, as the first is. Therefore, the word form implies only the first relation. This is why a form always has the nature of a cause, for a form is, in a sense, the cause of that which it informs—whether this informing takes place by inherence, as it does in the case of intrinsic forms, or by imitation, as it does in the case of exemplary forms. But an intelligible character and a likeness also have the second relationship, which does not give them the nature of a cause. If we speak, therefore, of an idea, considering only the notion that is properly conveyed by that word, then an idea includes only that kind of knowledge according to which a thing can be made. This is knowledge that is actually practical, or merely virtually practical, which, in some way, is speculative. On the other hand, if we call an idea an intelligible character or likeness in a wide sense, then an idea can also pertain to purely speculative knowledge. Or, if we wish to speak more formally, we should say that an idea belongs to knowledge that is practical, either actually or virtually; but an intelligible character or likeness belongs to both practical and speculative knowledge.
Aquinas, building on the thought of St. Augustine, asserts that the term “idea” has two levels of meaning: firstly, the idea of a thing is its form, that is, the order, structure or general shape of a thing (its ontological form); yet, another, more fundamental meaning is that it refers to that which gives a thing intelligibility, or, more specifically, an apprehension of that which gives a thing intelligibility, a knowledge of what gives a thing orderliness or allows a thing to exist as a unified, coherent whole. The form of “x” is the cause of “x” being what it is. When the mind has an idea of some thing, something in the mind begins to imitate the ontological form of its object, and therefore has an understanding of why a thing is the way it is. Thus, as Garrigou-Lagrange states, rationality is ultimately identifiable with knowledge of a metaphysical nature, that knowledge of things according to its ultimate causes, that is, those things that serve as the most foundational or ultimate explanatory principles in light of which we understand why a thing is the way it is. It is an understanding of a things raison d’etre. In his work The Sense of Mystery: Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life, Garrigou-Lagrange writes, “Human knowledge does not reach only to sensible beings insofar as they are sensible. It is not limited to phenomena. Instead, it reaches that which is intelligible in sensible things. That is to say, human reason does not seize only fact. It seizes also the raisons d’être of facts - it seizes the why, τὸ διότι.” As he continues, “…[T]he intellect…has intelligible being for its object.” By “intelligible being,” he means the fundamental qualities that define its nature, something in turn determined by its proper end. Garrigou-Lagrange contrasts this with the form of knowledge knowable through the senses and the imagination (that composite image of a thing existing in the subconscious created from a synthesis of all of the particular versions of that thing that we have perceived).
From our knowledge of the intelligible aspects of a thing, we come to see that not only are these things more fundamental than the purely physical or sensible elements of a thing, but are themselves particular expressions of an even more fundamental reality, namely being considered as such. Reason thus has as its proper object not this or that specific being, but that which gives the existence of individual beings their intelligibility, and ultimately being considered as such.
Reason is thus that by which humans abstract from what is immediately perceptible, and continue to do so until they consider the being of thing within its most universal framework. We see this, at least implicitly, in Pinker’s view of rationality: Pinker sees rationality as that whereby we fight against things like superstition, bigotry, false beliefs, and errors in reasoning. This is something that we accomplish through such things as the basic principles of probability, the laws of logic, and the basic principles of critical thinking. But one is led to ask: where is the law of noncontradiction? What do the basic principles of probability look like? These are not specific, material things, but things that can only be seen through a process of abstraction. Individual cognitive processes allow us to grasp things like the laws of probability or the laws of logic because they reflect something broader concerning the nature of reason, namely the fact that reason sees beyond the immediate or the particular and allows us to understand the intelligible and the universal that lies behind it, that which gives material things their coherence or intelligible unity, and thus, by extension, the standard by which we judge statements are true or reasonable.
Thus, while the core of Pinker’s definition of “reason” and that of most Catholic theologians and philosophers don’t contradict, the problem with Pinker’s approach is his explicit refusal to frame reason in terms of a faculty or a power. Is reason merely a collection of cognitive processes? Or is it, as most Catholic theologians have stated, the highest form of knowledge, that which has as its proper object the source of intelligibility and meaning behind a thing, and ultimately that which is the ground of all intelligibility, namely being (and thus, by extension, God, the Source of all being Who is, as the Catholic tradition has historically defined, Being in its most fully actualized form)?
Sources:
Steven Pinker, Rationality: Why It Matters, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (New York: Viking, 2021)
Fr. Bernard J. Wuellner, S.J., Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1956)
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., God, His Existence, and His Nature: A Thomistic Solution of Certain Agnostic Antinomies, vol. 1, translated by Dom Bede Rose, O.S.B., D.D. (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Company, 1939)
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., The Sense of Mystery: Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life, translated by Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville: Erasmus Academic, 2017)
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, Q. 82, A. 3, respondeo, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, accessed on: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1082.htm#article3
St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate Question 3, Article 3, respondeo, translated by Fr. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J., accessed on: https://web.archive.org/web/20180119190505/http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/QDdeVer3.htm