{"id":64601,"date":"2022-04-20T22:00:47","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T02:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=64601"},"modified":"2022-04-27T23:05:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T03:05:13","slug":"what-is-rational-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-rational-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Rational Thought and When Did It Start?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What is rational thought? Where did the concept of rational thought come from? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Black Box Thinking<\/em> answers the question: what is rational thought? The book talks about rational thought and how the Greeks embraced mistakes as crucial to learning. Before this period, worldwide views came from the gods and weren&#8217;t challenged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Keep reading to answer the question: what is rational thought? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-phase-1-defending-divine-knowledge-ancient-past-to-600bc\">Phase #1: Defending \u201cDivine Knowledge\u201d (Ancient Past to ~600BC)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Human cultures have always had worldviews\u2014ideas about how the world works\u2014but they haven\u2019t always promoted learning. No one knew the answer to the question: what is rational thought? <strong>When we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes and in the early civilizations that followed, many worldviews were dogmatic and thought to come from the gods<\/strong>\u2014which meant they weren\u2019t to be challenged.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, Chinese paganism holds that the Dragon King (\u9f8d\u738b <em>L\u00f3ngw\u00e1ng<\/em>) controls the rains and the creatures of the seas; no one would challenge this belief for fear of invoking his wrath and losing loved ones at sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Shortform note: While we often hear about the negatives of tribalism, tribes helped humans to cohere, coordinate, and survive for thousands of years. Today, psychologists acknowledge that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/blog\/the-squeaky-wheel\/202002\/the-importance-belonging-tribe\">tribes give people a sense of belonging<\/a>, a better understanding of their purpose, and a valuable social support network. So while dogmatic beliefs might negatively affect <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/cycles-of-society\/\">societal progress<\/a>, they aren\u2019t all bad. Overcoming the negatives of tribalism likely means embracing the positives\u2014forming tribes is in our DNA, whether we like it or not.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Primarily the \u201cpriest class\u201d defended these myth-based worldviews, treating them as sacred and infallible wisdom. In addition, the power elites would suppress dissenters with violence or banish them, Syed says. This kept their \u201ctruth\u201d undisturbed from generation to generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, Jesus of Nazareth\u2014the historical Jesus\u2014was crucified because the ruling Romans saw his novel religious teachings as a threat to their established order (Pagan religion, Roman law and ethics, and so on).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Because those in power treated alternative perspectives as threats, they lost the opportunity to learn<\/strong>. In other words, their worldviews remained static because they didn\u2019t acknowledge the possibility that they had flaws.&nbsp;No one wondered: what is rational thought? &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Shortform note: While powerful leaders have always had their sycophants, modern echo chambers exacerbate the problem. Because our information streams are often personalized\u2014think your curated social media feeds\u2014and because we surround ourselves with like-minded thinkers, <a href=\"https:\/\/maybusch.com\/why-being-with-like-minded-people-is-dangerous\/\">it\u2019s easier than ever to inadvertently avoid alternate perspectives<\/a>. This causes exactly the stagnation that Syed describes: When nothing challenges the dominant view, a group\u2019s thinking will fall into a rut. To avoid this, actively seek out people who may disagree with you, and read reputable information from both sides of an issue.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-phase-2-rational-thought-arrives-600-bc-to-300-bc\">Phase #2: Rational Thought Arrives (~600 BC to ~300 BC)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>What is rational thought? Before 600 BC, it is likely no one knew. This \u201cdivine knowledge\u201d paradigm didn\u2019t last forever. With the dawn of the classical Greek period, thinkers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle developed rational thought. They treated ideas as speculative and developed them through a back-and-forth exchange of differing perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Under this paradigm, <\/strong>Syed explains,<strong> the Greeks embraced errors as integral to learning<\/strong>. When discourse revealed the flaws in an argument, the thinkers would seek to improve it. In this way, the tradition of dogma began to fall away, and rational, scientific thought began to emerge.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Rationality Versus Empiricism<\/strong><br><br>Although Syed conflates <em>rationality<\/em> and <em>empiricism<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/rationalism-empiricism\/\">they\u2019re distinct approaches to scientific thought<\/a>. Both have their roots in the classical Greek period he describes, and they have long challenged each other on the proper way to establish valid knowledge.<br><br>In short, empiricists hold that all knowledge derives from <em>external sensory experience<\/em> (our five senses) and <em>internal sensory experience<\/em> (observation of mental phenomena). In other words, you come to <em>know<\/em> something by sensing it, and in that way discover the laws of the natural world.<br><br>In contrast, rationalists argue that <em>reason <\/em>enables us to intuit and deduce concepts that have no basis in sensory reality (<em>a priori<\/em> knowledge). For example, a rationalist might say that a logical statement, \u201c13 is a prime number less than 22,\u201d couldn\u2019t come from sensory experience. Rather, it\u2019s an abstract formulation of knowledge that depends on intuited insights about numbers and mathematics.<br><br>Rationalists and empiricists tend to agree that some knowledge comes from such abstract reasoning, though other knowledge undeniably comes from sensory experience\u2014for example, you know water and wetness by its <em>feeling<\/em>. If we \u201cboth-and\u201d the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/two-schools-of-thought\/\">two schools of thought<\/a>, it\u2019s clear that both abstract reason and sense-based reason have a place in scientific thinking.\u00a0<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-phase-3-the-church-battles-rational-thought-300-bc-to-1600-ad\">Phase #3: The Church Battles Rational Thought (~300 BC to ~1600 AD)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>What is rational thought doing to help progress society? Though rational thought briefly flourished, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/western-thinking\/\">Western worldview<\/a> receded into dogma after the classical Greek period. Syed explains that <strong>the church combined Christian strictures with a dogmatic interpretation of Aristotle\u2019s work, and it punished dissenters<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This resurgence of the \u201cdivine knowledge\u201d paradigm dominated until around the 17th century, when thinkers (Syed chiefly credits Francis Bacon, who helped develop the scientific method) revived the scientific mindset. Though they met resistance\u2014Galileo, for example, was put under lifetime house arrest for challenging Christian cosmology\u2014the rational tradition found its footing and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/scientific-progress\/\">scientific progress<\/a> resumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What is rational thought&#8217;s pivotal moment in history? The work of Galileo, Bacon, and others led into the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries\u2014Europe\u2019s return to rational, scientific thought.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Shortform note: In any age, the dominant worldview tends to become more or less dogmatic. Today, science is partially guilty of this, as the church was in medieval times. \u201cScientism\u201d is a quasi-religious view, held by some scientists, that purports science is the only valid way to know things. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-folly-of-scientism\">In \u201cThe Folly of Scientism,<\/a>\u201d Austin Hughes argues that scientism constitutes an attempt to extend the scientific method into areas of philosophy that it simply can\u2019t comment on. This unflinching belief in the ultimate power of science, he says, is much like religious superstition. To counter this trend, he argues\u2014as Syed describes above\u2014that we need a resurgence of reasoned, Enlightenment-style thinking that clarifies the strengths and limitations of scientific methods.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is rational thought? Where did the concept of rational thought come from? Black Box Thinking answers the question: what is rational thought? The book talks about rational thought and how the Greeks embraced mistakes as crucial to learning. Before this period, worldwide views came from the gods and weren&#8217;t challenged. Keep reading to answer the question: what is rational thought?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,24],"tags":[601],"class_list":["post-64601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-society","tag-black-box-thinking","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What Is Rational Thought and When Did It Start? - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What is rational thought? 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