Preliminaries: Prerequisites, review, and caveats

Currently, this section is available on Substack, as a near-final draft, rather than here.

Book contents

In the Cells of the Eggplant
Meta-rationality: An introduction
Is this book for you? How meta-rationality can level up your work in science, technology, and engineering.
- Rationality and refrigerators
  This book offers more sophisticated understanding of truth than both rationalist absolutism and postmodernist relativism.
- Clouds and eggplants
  The relationship between nebulosity—the inherent fuzziness of the world—and rationality is a central concern of meta-rationality.
- A credibility revolution in the post-truth era
  Why meta-rationality matters for progress: leveling up science, technology, and society, even as they are unraveling.
- The structure of The Eggplant
  A structural overview of the meta-rationality book In The Cells Of The Eggplant.
Part One: Taking rationalism seriously
The hope that systematic rationality can reliably provide certainty, understanding, and control fails when it encounters nebulosity.
- Rationality, rationalism, and alternatives
  Defining the subject matter: rationality, rationalism, reasonableness, and meta-rationality.
- Rationalism’s responses to trouble
  Rationalism responds to its failures, in the face of nebulosity, by making more complicated formal theories.
- Positive and logical
  Early 20th-century logical positivism was the last serious rationalism. Better understandings of rationality learn from its mistakes.
- The world is everything that is the case
  Aristotelian logic was mistaken both in details and overall conception, yet its key ideas survive in contemporary rationalism.
- Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
  Formal logic successfully addresses important defects in traditional, Aristotelian logic, but cannot deal with contextuality.
- The value of meaninglessness
  Recognizing that some statements are neither true nor false was a major advance in early 20th-century rationalism.
- The truth of the matter
  Formal rationality requires absolute truths, but those are rare in the eggplant-sized world. How do we do rationality without them?
- Reductio ad reductionem
  Reduction is a powertool of rationality, but reductionism can’t work as a general theory; most rationality is not reduction.
- Are eggplants fruits?
  Formal methods formally require impossibly precise definitions of terms. How do we use them effectively without that?
- When will you go bald?
  “Shades of gray” is sometimes a good way to think about nebulosity—the world’s inherent fuzziness—but not always.
- Overdriving approximation
  Approximation is a powerful technique, but is not applicable in all rational work, and so is not a good general theory of nebulosity.
- Reference: rationalism’s reality problem
  The correspondence theory of truth doesn’t work by metaphysical magic. We must do the work to make it work—by any means necessary.
- The National Omelet Registry
  Rationalism implicitly or explicitly assumes that every object in the universe has a unique ID number.
- Objects, objectively
  Rational methods assume objects are objectively separable; but they aren’t. How do we use rationality effectively anyway?
- Is this an eggplant which I see before me?
  Rationalist theories assume perception delivers an objective description of the world to rationality. It can’t, and doesn’t try to.
- What can you believe?
  Propositions are whatever sort of thing it is you can believe. Nothing can play that role; so we need a different understanding of belief.
- Where did you get that idea in the first place?
  Rationalism does not explain where hypotheses, theories, discoveries, inventions, or other new ideas come from.
- The Spanish Inquisition
  Unboundedly many issues may be relevant to any practical problem, so mathematical logic does not work as advertised.
- Interlude: A logical farce
  A musical comedy, set in 1987, about the failure of the logicist program in artificial intelligence.
- Probabilism
  Probability theory seems an attractive foundation for rationalism—but it is not up to the job.
- Leaving the casino
  Probabilistic rationalism encourages you to view the whole world as a gigantic casino—but mostly it is not like that.
- What probability can’t do
  If probability theory were an epistemology, we’d want it to tell us how confident to be in our beliefs. Unfortunately, it can’t do that.
- The probability of green cheese
  A thought experiment shows why probability theory and statistics cannot address uncertainty in general.
- Statistics and the replication crisis
  The mistaken belief that statistical methods can tell you what to believe drove the science replication crisis.
- Acting on the truth
  Rationalist theories of action try to deduce optimal choices from true beliefs. This is rarely possible in practice.
- ⚒︎ Overcoming post-rationalist nihilism
  Realizing rationalism is wrong can be devastating. Antidotes to the ensuing rage, anxiety, and depression are available, fortunately!
Part Two: Taking reasonableness seriously
Everyday reasonableness is the foundation of technical, formal, and systematic rationality.
- This is not cognitive science
  The Eggplant is neither cognitive nor science, although it seeks a better understanding of some phenomena cognitive science has studied.
- The ethnomethodological flip
  A dramatic perspective shift: understanding rationality as dependent on mere reasonableness to connect it with reality.
- Aspects of reasonableness
  A summary explanation of everyday reasonable activity, with a tabular guide and a concrete example.
- Reasonableness is meaningful activity
  Understanding concrete, purposeful activity is a prerequisite to understanding the formal rationality that depends on it.
- You are accountable for reasonableness
  Accountability is the key concept in understanding mere reasonableness, as contrasted with systematic rationality.
- Reasonableness is routine
  Routine activity usually goes smoothly overall, despite frequent minor glitches, because we have methods for repairing trouble.
- Meaningful perception
  We actively work to perceive aspects of the world as meaningful, in terms of our purposes, in context.
- The purpose of meaning
  Peculiar features of language make sense as tools to enable collaboration, rather than to express objective truths.
- How we refer
  We accomplish reference by any means necessary: observable, improvised work that makes it clear what we are talking about in context.
- Reasonable believings
  The epistemological categories—truth, belief, inference—are richer, more complex, diverse, and nebulous than rationalism supposes.
- ⚒︎ Reasonable ontology
  Reasonableness works with nebulous, tacit, interactive, accountable, purposeful ontologies, which enable everyday routine activity.
- Instructed activity
  Using instructions requires figuring out what they mean in the context of your activity, and relative to your purposes.
⚒︎ Part Three: Taking rationality seriously
A pragmatic understanding of how systematic rationality works in practice can help you level up your technical work.
- The parable of the pebbles
  Even counting, the simplest rational method, works only with the aid of non-rational support.
Interlude: Ontological remodeling
Reconfiguring categories, properties, and relationships is a meta-rational skill—key in scientific revolutions.
⚒︎ Part Four: Taking meta-rationality seriously
The heart of the meta-rationality book: what meta-rationality is, why it matters, and how to do it.
- ⚒︎ Preliminaries: Prerequisites, review, and caveats
  A review of Parts One, Two, and Three; meta-rationalism defined; dispelling easy misunderstandings
⚒︎ Part Five: Taking rational work seriously
Putting meta-rationality to work, in statistics, experimental science, software development, and entrepreneurship.

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Meta-rationality powers up technical skills by better understanding how rationality works.

This site includes a book about meta-rationality, In the Cells of the Eggplant; stand-alone essays that don't fit in the book; and a metablog of news, views, and commentary.

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