>The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way.
This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures.
We would get further with rationalism if we remembered or maybe admitted that we do it for reasons that make sense only in a complex social world.
A lot of people really need to be reminded of this.
I originally came to this critique via Heidegger, who argues that enlightenment thinking essentially forgets / obscures Being itself, a specific mode of which you experience at this very moment as you read this comment, which is really the basis of everything that we know, including science, technology, and rationality. It seems important to recover and deepen this understanding if we are to have any hope of managing science and technology in a way that is actually beneficial to humans.
Brilliant way to phrase this idea! I think its incredible that we can even manage an imperfect way to escape our "social" brain. It's clearly very powerful - math, and thus all of science, only exist because of how weird predaliction to thinking abstractly enough to (sorta) break our social bounds. At least when thinking in these terms, I am sure you can poke holes in it.
Thanks, I might actually go do this :) I recently got exposed to a very persuasive form of "rationalism is a social construct" by reading "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland. But a theme in these comments is that a lot of these ideas are just recycled from philosophers and that the philosophers were less likely to try and induct you into a cult.
This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures.
We would get further with rationalism if we remembered or maybe admitted that we do it for reasons that make sense only in a complex social world.