An amusing exchange between Steven Pinker and Tyler Cowen on the value of reason and rationality.
COWEN: Here’s one difference between us perhaps, and we discussed this earlier in the green room. I think of you as believing more strongly in the powers of human reason than I do.
When we hit upon these various (you might call them) antinomies?—?What does consciousness really mean? Is the world really free? How do we think about time??—?you’re quite willing to pull a Kantian or Wittgensteinian move and say, “Well, it all collapses into contradiction. Colin McGinn, that’s knowledge forever denied to us.” Then there’s this other sphere in which reason operates quite well.
I tend to think of that more as a continuum: if we can’t understand some truly fundamental things, the problems in our thinking will bleed into everything we try to analyze. I tend to think of reason as being fairly weak.
Maybe I’m more Hayekian in this way than you are: people being ruled by their passions, as David Hume might have thought. In this sense I’m more skeptical about the Enlightenment. What can you say to talk me out of this skepticism and back into the truly Pinkerian view?
PINKER: What are we doing here if you don’t believe in reason? Why don’t we have an arm wrestle or a beauty contest?
COWEN: After dinner.