Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

The final book I read for the 2021 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Published in 2021 is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by Steven Pinker, 2021.

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University and has written 8 books for general audiences on topics such philosophy, social relations and language. Being interested in language and how it develops, I’ve read his books The Language Instinct and The Sense of Style. I found that his writing is coherent and thought-provoking, so I wanted to try another theme and “rationality” seems particularly appropriate these days when it does, indeed, seem scarce.

His book is structured in such a way that each chapter builds on the ideas and information in the previous ones. He starts with a focus on the ways that ‘rationality’ can be defined, and how it is evident or lacking in human beings. His examples include many logic problems, with explanations of why so many people cannot solve the problems correctly. This relies on statistics and percentages of probability, which I found difficult to follow. In fact, I found many of his examples in this book to be difficult to grasp, and I skimmed over some of the more complicated ones.

However, I did get an overview of such topics as formal logic, probability theory, cause vs. correlation theory and game theory. This background did not lead to ideas for how to make decisions more rationally, which was one of the reasons I chose this book. Perhaps that was not one of his goals in writing this book, although it is not clear to me what his goal was.

The book reads like detailed notes from a series of lectures rather than a rationale for rational thinking. I assume that anyone choosing to read this book already thinks that rationality is a useful tool in making decisions, so it isn’t necessary to persuade them. And since he uses “anti-vaxers” and Donald Trump as examples of non-rationality, I think that this book is unlikely to appeal to or convince people who disagree. But for a better understanding of how humans make up their mind and/or change their mind, this book gives a lot of food for thought.