Are You Committed to Reason?

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i think of reason as a continuum, that if we can't understand some truly fundamental things, the problems in our thinking will bleed into everything we try to analyze. Maybe i'm more hiechian in this way than you are, people ruled by their passions,. And in this sense, i'm more sceptical about the enlightenment. Yu's partly making a conceptual point, that the ability to go from a to b using reason doesn't tell you what the b should be. That there's justa logical distinction between goals, on the one hand, or desires and beliefs, and that you can’t, ah through a chain of deduction, identify what you ought to aim for

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

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