(Text behind a talk delivered at the Wittenstein Society Conference, "Rationality and Irrationality"   Kirchberg, Austria  August 2000)
Now published in in Berit Brogaard and Barry Smith, eds., Rationality and Irrationality  pp. 77-93.

©  Ronald de Sousa
University of Toronto
sousa@chass.utoronto.ca
 

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen.
(Enlightenment is man's departure from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.) (Kant)

Wie könnte ich mich in der Annahme irren, dass ich nie auf dem Mond war?
(How might I be mistaken in my assumption that I was never on the moon?)     Wittgenstein

Philosophy is the only subject in which one-upmanship commonly consists in declaring one's failure to understand. This is no mere affectation, but an essential clue to the vocation of philosophy, which is to resist the leap of faith. Yet leaps of faith generate science as well as religion. Merely to obstruct both therefore seems churlish. Enlightened stupidity must foster intellectual conscience. Arguments do not compel a unique conclusion, but a choice of alternatives. The best response is to adopt the least implausible alternative. This expresses a recognition of an essentially subjective element in what is reasonable. This may be liberating, perhaps even subversive; but it offers little positive guidance. Moreover, in the light of the "irrationality debate" (Tversky, Gigerenzer et al.) our most natural reasoning patterns likely embody "fast and frugal" strategies that remain systematically misleading. From these considerations, I attempt to salvage a modest Enlightenment ideal of negative reason.
 
 
 

A Profession of Stupidity

Imagine that one of our number, preferably of the most eminent, had consented to collude in an experiment, consisting in the delivery of a lecture carefully crafted to be complete nonsense¹. Polled at the exit, many another audience would have declared the lecture very clear, and claimed to have understood it perfectly. We philosophers, by contrast, would be more likely to respond with "Complete rubbish. Didn't understand a word." Other people who want to show they are smart pretend they understand everything. Philosophy is the only subject in which one-upmanship commonly consists in proclaiming incomprehension. Excesses aside, this attitude is the pride of our profession. It is no mere affectation, but an essential clue to the vocation of philosophy, which is to abjure the leap of faith. Yet I don't think we've actually carried it far enough. Just how far is enough, is the topic of my talk.

Man, it used to be said, is a rational animal. Actually it would be more literally correct to say that humankind is the only irrational animal. That is not merely the cliché it seems to be, still less is it a paradox; it simply follows from the relevant sense of `rational', which contrasts not with irrational but with arational. What is intended by attributing rationality to humans is that we alone may be aptly assessed as more or less irrational. In an evaluative sense, we may be rational or not: and that, by definition, is what it is to be rational in the categorial sense. When you convict me of irrationality, you typically do it out of my own mouth, resting your case on the authority I claim to express in words my own beliefs, my desires, and the interpretation of my actions. By contrast, if you want to demonstrate that an animal is irrational, your ascription of beliefs and desires relies on non-verbal evidence, which includes the "irrational" behaviour in question. But to say that the behaviour is irrational is to say that one's description fails to cohere with the imputed beliefs and desires. No words bear witness to what the animal really meant, and meant to do, so you may never exclude the possibility that the failure of coherence stems from your own mistaken ascriptions.

This contrast is too neat, and there have been attempts to nibble at it from both sides. Richard Dawkins, for example, undertook to explore whether the digger wasp or sphex committed the Concorde fallacy by fighting for its burrow in proportion not to its contents but the time invested in stocking it.² He concluded, naturally enough, that it did not, for "every animal optimizes some value, given certain constraints. The task of the biologist is to discover the nature of those constraints." (Dawkins 1982, 48) . Now that can hardly count as a scientific discovery. It has all the marks, instead, of a reasonable methodological principle, which precludes the discovery that an animal without language is irrational. For if the sphex is "found" to have committed the Concorde fallacy, it must be because we have not adequately taken into account the epistemic limitations that constrain it.

Gnawing at the distinction from the other side, (Quine 1960, chapter 2) and others have claimed that if a foreigner's thought is translated as a contradiction, that is just evidence of mistranslation. Donald Davidson has extended this "principle of charity" to urge that "we can dismiss a priori the chance of massive error" on the part of those whose thought we are attempting to understand. (Davidson 1982, 168-9).³The attribution of categorial rationality entails that at some level the subject in question is seen as evaluatively rational. And in the face of supposed evidence that many of our most common inference strategies are systematically flawed, (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982) others have argued that these strategies can be vindicated, either as being the best under constraining circumstances, or more strongly as being the best possible when rightly understood. (Cohen 1981), (Gigerenzer, Todd and ABC Research Group 1999)

I shall return to the "rationality debate" in my conclusion. I want first to consider a different defense of certain suspect inferential strategies, based not on the claim that they are, after all, more rational than they appear, but on the contrary on a direct plea for the virtues of irrationality. In common parlance, cleverness and stupidity are opposites, and stupidity and irrationality are kindred vices. As I use them here, cleverness is inseparable from irrationality, and stupidity and cleverness are polar opposites:

Usual Terminology:
 

		STUPIDITY
CLEVERNESS	<--(opposites)-->	||
		IRRATIONALITY

My Terminology:
 
 

CLEVERNESS
||	<--(opposites)-->	STUPIDITY
IRRATIONALITY

The case for the virtues of irrationality is therefore the case against my central plea, against cleverness and for stupidity.
 

The case for the virtues of irrationality is therefore the case against my central plea, against cleverness and for stupidity. .

The Leap into Irrationality

It was by making a leap into irrationality that our ancestors achieved the status of homo sapiens. Becoming human was, we like to think, a big leap forward for intelligence: but this meant, ipso facto, a great leap forward for irrationality. Let me sum this up in a slogan before explaining what I mean:

Religion and superstition⁴ are the price we pay for science.

Anthropologists like to stress the role of ritual in distinguishing human from non-human life. Rituals are the beginning of tradition and culture. What is less often noted is the extent to which culture, tradition, and rituals are essentially irrational. The behaviour of other primates-even when it resembles social ritual-can generally be construed as having a plausible function. But although much effort has been expended in explaining the function of religion, these have tended to rest on speculation, built on the a priori principle that something as widespread and as powerful as religion simply must have had some biological "function". In fact, though, all such explanations have to contend with the fact that the rituals of culture are often destructive and counterproductive by any reasonable biological yardstick (Burkert 1996); (Sober and Wilson 1998, 159-194).

That is not to imply that natural selection can't be responsible for many distasteful and destructive human characteristics. The genetic advantages of rape and aggression are all too obvious, even if hard theoretical work can sometimes come up with offsetting drawbacks. But the great mad products of culture-the specific doctrines of the grand religions, as opposed to everyday superstitions-seem to belong exclusively to humans with a culture. Walter Burkert has put it thus:

We humans are capable of experiencing states described as "loss of reality"-chimpanzees are apparently immune to this-in such diverse manifestations as extreme patriotism, the fascination of games and sports, and scientists' or artists' proverbial distraction . . . and, not least, the fervor of religious behavior (Burkert 1996, 16)

Burkert's yoking together of science and religion may startle. But it is surely right, and sums up the case for irrationality. To make this more perspicuous, we need to distinguish different sources of error, corresponding to different levels of inference. I distinguish three levels: (I) superstition and prejudice; (II) the Leap of Faith, and (III) The Animist hypothesis.

(I) Superstition and Prejudice

Consider first the level of simple enumerative induction. B.F. Skinner famously demonstrated that pigeons could be superstitious (Skinner 1948). Chance associations, even when they are actually statistically non-significant, can modify expectations. This works in pigeons no less than humans, because it is a consequence of the mechanism of learning by operant conditioning. More picturesquely-but at not much greater distance from the underlying physiological mechanisms-Plato's Theaetetus surmises that some minds are made of soft clay, and therefore easily written on but as easily wiped clean. Others are made of hard clay, and on them experience makes fewer but more lasting marks. Plato's different tablets anticipate what statisticians call errors of type I (rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true) and errors of type II (accepting the null hypothesis when it is false.) Both Skinner's pigeons and Plato's minds of clay illustrate the fact that there is no general ideal solution to the problem of defining optimal inductive strategies. Whatever you do to decrease your chances of committing one type of error automatically increases your chances of making the opposite error. The "best" compromise in some circumstances isn't necessarily the best in other circumstances. No amount of wise design, by God or natural selection, can keep us from this plight: If we are ever to learn anything, we must be susceptible to superstition.

And, we might add, to prejudice too. For if what we learn is ever to be useful, it must be generalized to new objects and situations. That requires that new objects and situations be categorized. To categorize something is to attribute to it a set of properties "wholesale", that is, in advance of any evidence for the presence of each property in the set. And that is just the definition of prejudice.

Errors of type I-superstition and prejudice-and errors of type II-ignoring evidence that turns out to be vital-are common to all learning organisms. Each species, however, has presumably been tuned by natural selection so as to optimize the balance between the two errors in the environment of adaptation.

But environments can change. Someone determined to find irrationality in animals without language could seize on this point. A ground level kind of irrationality might be assigned to organisms equipped with strategies no longer optimal in a changed environment. Such organisms could be said to be systematically superstitious: their mistakes arise, as does ordinary superstition, out of inductions from unrepresentative samples. But the sampling has taken place on the level of the population and its genome, instead of affecting the selection of operant responses in an individual.

While superstition, both individual and phylogenetic, may be accounted irrational, it is free of cleverness, and I shall set it aside in what follows. More interesting irrationality, of the kind linked to cleverness, arises at the other two levels of inference. It comes in two forms, most readily illustrated in terms of religious or magical beliefs. Call them the Leap of Faith and the Animist hypothesis. The former are still located in the inductive domain; the latter concern inferences that go beyond it.

II The leap of faith.

Miracles may be defined as supernaturally caused exceptions to natural law. According to a famous argument set out by (Hume 1975), the occurrence of a miracle is not logically impossible, yet the claim that a miracle occurred could never be rationally believed. For the grounds on which we are asked to accept that it occurred are inductive (miracles must be witnessed and the witnesses' testimony must be transmitted). But the testimony that supports it could never outweigh the experience which grounds belief in the law of nature to which it purports to be an exception. That body of inductive evidence, to the effect that such things do not happen, must be of greater weight. For if it were otherwise, then the allegedly miraculous event would be merely unusual, rather than constituting an exception to the laws of nature.

What needs to be underlined about the notion of miracles is that it opens up a fissure between what is possibly true and what might possibly be rationally believed.

Hence the leap of faith commonly embraced by religious apologists.⁵

The leap of faith is by definition irrational. It seems to offer, therefore, a good target for reasonable stupidity. Surely, if believing reasonably is to have any meaning, it must entail believing only the more probable (if any) of any set of alternative hypotheses. I offer this as a Reasonable, If Simple-minded, Criterion of acceptability for beliefs:

(RISC): Believe whatever seems to you least likely to be false.

Yet two arguments might be offered against (RISC), in defense of believing improbable things.

First, there is a crucial difference between (a) and (b):

(a) It is rational to design an organism to (occasionally) *.

(b) It is (occasionally) rational for an organism to *.

(b) does not follow from (a). Let * be: accept the more improbable hypothesis. It might be a rational design feature to equip an organism with a capacity for occasionally doing *. For the improbable must sometimes happen. Hence if we never believed the improbable, we would be virtually certain to make mistakes, while if we occasionally did so, it would take only extreme good fortune to be always right. Compare a familiar problem in gradualist evolutionary theory: in order to attain global fitness peaks, a population must avoid getting stuck in local maxima. "Leaps of faith" are the epistemic equivalents of the kind of "adaptive noise" which will enable a population to survive a momentary retreat from maximal local fitness, resulting in its ability to start climbing to higher ground inaccessible without such a temporary loss of altitude. (See Matthen forthcoming).

Any individual believer, however, is not in the position to design an inference mechanism, but must implement a reasonable policy. Individually, the relevant problem is whether to adopt (b), not whether to adopt (a). In that situation, clearly, (RISC) remains acceptable.

A second reason to think it may sometimes be reasonable to believe the more improbable hypothesis may suggest itself if we call to mind a charming principle of textual criticism, sometimes known as the lectio difficilior. This recommends, when choosing between that two readings in different manuscripts, that the more improbable version be taken as more likely correct. But that is no leap of faith. It simply follows from the assumption that an error in transcription is more likely to result in changing an uncommon expression into a common one. It rests essentially, therefore, on a psychological hypothesis. This principle is not available when we are simply trying to decode the book of nature. But that only holds true if we assume that nature is not a psychological agent. If Nature is represented as having intentions-as soon as it is personified as God, that is-the lectio difficilior acquires a theological analogue. For God may be masking an unobvious truth by means of a plausible falsehood, aimed explicitly at tricking me. Perhaps I should infer, as did Philip Henry Gosse, that fossils were placed in the earth by God expressly to mislead those whose faith was insufficiently steadfast (Gosse 1857); see (Gardner 1957).

One trouble with this relative of the lectio difficilior, however, is that it is entirely gratuitous. In the absence of any positive evidence, there is no reason to prefer Gosse's hypothesis to the alternative, that God placed the Bible in our way to mislead those who are excessively credulous-or any other of an infinity of alternatives. The imperative of reasonable stupidity applicable in this case might be formulated in a slightly more explicit version of (RISC):

(RISC') Reject any hypothesis which on available evidence has no greater probability than all alternatives hypotheses.

One obvious difficulty with this principle, however, is that is cries out for an account of probability. Unless we take probability as subjective degree of belief, (RISC') is of no use. But if we do, then it lets Gosse off the hook, since the hypothesis of God's creation had high prior probability for him.

I will suggest how we might modify (RISC') to meet this objection in a moment. First, we must pause to consider the additional complication introduced by the supposition that nature is an agent. That hypothesis brings us to the second type of extra-inductive inference.

III The Animist hypothesis

The hypothesis that we are dealing, not with mere facts of nature, but with another intentional being, is the more extreme challenge posed to philosophical stupidity by many religions. The sort of irrational leap demanded here does not derive from any inductive rule, however tortuous. It demands assent not merely to unobserved truths, but to explanatory hypotheses intended to provide explanations for observable phenomena: The creation of the world by an intelligent being. The intervention of the holy spirit. The doctrine of transsubstantiation. In the words of Burkert: "The first principal characteristic of religion is negative: that is, religion deals with the non obvious, the unseen, that "which cannot be verified empirically"." (p. 5)

Yet there isn't anything intrinsically unscientific about hypotheses referring to the "unseen": to the list of "unseens" just given, we might add: the existence of atoms; the occurrence of the Big Bang, etc. Both sorts of non-inductive theoretical posits, in fact, are doubtless among the possibilities necessarily entailed by the invention of language: as Burkert writes, "the common world of language characteristically produces contents beyond any immediate evidence. ... Language refers to... segments of reality inaccessible to verification." (25) Hence the mental capacity that makes it possible to devise the absurdities of religion must be the very same as that which makes possible the birth of genuine science. Both express the human capacity to go beyond induction, and to postulate radically unobservable models of a reality that lies behind experience, and explains it. Clever and creative fancy is necessary to the very existence of science: the leap into a realm that goes beyond the merely inductive and posits entities that cannot be directly experienced. If that is irrational, then irrationality is an intrinsically necessary price we pay for creative scientific thought.⁶

The religious hypothesis, however, incorporates in addition an animist hypothesis: that the unseen world contains entities with intentions, liable to be influenced by gifts, to bargain, and generally be moved by human emotions. The world might have worked that way. But this, surely, is where philosophical stupidity should come into its own. While the religious hypotheses cannot be shown to be logically untenable any more than any other empirical claim, they are manifestly disconfirmed no less than, say, the ingenious surmise of Anaximenes that everything is air at different degrees of concentration. It is puzzling to find that many philosophers "pull their punches" in the face of religious doctrines. In a recent issue of Philosophy Now, to cite but one example, Peter van Inwagen argued that Christian belief was rationally warranted because atheists could not prove the non-existence of God. (van Inwagen and Hill 1999) Yet I doubt whether Inwagen would use the same argument to support the rationality of believing in the Loch Ness Monster, or ectoplasm, or Shiva. [note added 2005: van Inwagen entirely repudiates this intepretation of his position as "God's barrister".  I apologize here for this distortion of what I gather is his weaker view that belief in God can't be shown to be wholly irrational.  I agree with that, but also think that despite the popularity of various versions of theism, they are all irrational and often clever, and philosophy betrays its vocation of stupidity by displaying cleverness on their behalf in the tradition of Anselm, Plantinga, and van Inwagen.]

On topics specifically philosophical rather than theological, philosophers have also been unsparing of ingenious arguments for preposterous conclusions. Currently most fashionable, it seems, are versions of the Kantian argument that purports to derive a moral imperative from purely a priori considerations, such as (Gewirth 1998).⁷ What these arguments have in common, apart from the ingenious yet feeble support offered for them, is that they are all too often propounded in a spirit of authority: If you don't follow this argument or are not persuaded by it, that just shows you're stupid. I suggest that the reasonable response to this is to endorse this judgment, and proudly to assume one's stupidity, re-defined as the refusal to believe something on the basis of a clever argument one doesn't quite understand.

The Principle of Reasonable Stupidity

The logical ground of this idea of reasonable stupidity emerges from one wholly general feature of the use of deductive reason which might be called the multivalence of argument. It can most simply be put thus: no argument ever compels.⁸ A deductive argument gives us a set of alternatives:

•  believe the conclusion together with the premises, or
•  continue to reject the conclusion, but then also reject one or more premises; or
•  reject the argument form as fallacious.

(RISC'') In the face of any deductive argument, accept the conclusion or reject a premise, whichever seem the less incredible alternative now, all things considered.

(RISC'') differs from (RISC') in being more restricted in its scope, and in its inclusion of an "all things considered" clause, to be interpreted as a constraint on subjective probability assignments. It entails that at least sometimes the most rational thing to do is to be, in effect, illogical, if indeed it is illogical to reject the conclusion of an argument even if you are unable to refute any of its premises or show it to be invalid.

It is important to stress that (RISC'') doesn't forbid us to attempt a refutation of the unacceptable argument. Unless we make the attempt, we can hardly claim to have "considered all." The refusal to accept the conclusion of a clever argument can sometimes suggest a diagnosis, and lead to genuine intellectual progress.

We can illustrate this with a classic example. Consider the following reconstruction of Zeno's first paradox, Zeno's `Dichotomy'.⁹

¦_______________________¦__________¦_____¦____¦

A                                       C                D        E    B

1.  [Suppose] S moves from A to B in a finite time.

2. It must first pass through an intermediate point C.

3. But to get from C to B, it must still pass through D.

4. But 3 is applicable an infinite number of times.

5. So (LEMMA) to get from A to B, a moving object must cross an infinite number of finite stretches.

6. Crossing each stretch must take a finite time.

7. THEREFORE to cross an infinite number of finite stretches must take an infinite amount of time.

8. THEREFORE motion from A to B must take both a finite and an infinite amount of time.

9. 8 is a contradiction.

10. THEREFORE 1 is false.

Zeno wants us to think this argument derives a contradiction from the existence of motion. But actually it doesn't do that: it purports to derive a contradiction from the existence of motion interpreted as committing us to certain other premises. But surely the existence of motion is more obvious than the conjunction of premises 1-8. So (RISC'') offers pertinent counsel.

There seem to be two paths of resistance:

(i). the know-nothing way, which itself has two versions:

a) naive (we needn't bother with an argument to an unbelievable conclusion)

b) sophisticated (the Leap of Faith: Truth lies beyond the reach of Reason).

Alternative (b), however, does not merit the approbation it all too commonly elicits: no one ever invokes faith unless they've already lost the argument. In any case, it cannot of itself provide any guidance as to which alternative to plump for: accepting the unbelievable conclusion, or rejecting some indubitable premise. It therefore quickly collapses into (a). And reaction (a) is quite reasonable if there is, from one's point of view, nothing to choose between the alternatives of rejecting the argument without explanation and rejecting the existence of motion without reconciling that with common-sense experience.

A little more effort, however, can enable us to make progress, if we adopt the second way:

i) the intellectually responsible way. This can take any of three forms:

a) find an explanation for the conclusion's apparent falsehood;
b) find a reason to reject a premise; or
c) find a fallacy in the argument form.

The implicit premise that allows us to pass from 6 to (7) is (6'):

6' The sum of an infinite number of finite stretches is infinite.

6'' The sum of an infinite number of finite stretches of at least some minimum finite size d is infinite.

The Subjective Element in Rationality

One aspect of (RISC'') which may be found disturbing is its acknowledgement of an essentially subjective aspect in deductive argument. For this implies a limitation on the universality of reason. "Reason belongs to all," said Heracleitus, "and yet everyone thinks they have a private understanding." The generality of reason is a powerful idea. It lies behind the possibility of logic, and therefore of every kind of technology, notably the computer technology which now runs our lives. From a philosophical point of view, it grounds the twin pillars of Enlightenment modernity: on the epistemological side, the ideal of a unified, intersubjectively validated science, and on the ethical side, the idea of impartiality.¹⁰

The belief in the generality of reason is under threat. Self-styled postmodernists think reason is just a mask for power, that all that we can hope to have is persuasive narratives, that all claims to universality are bogus and self-serving. Even outside that sect, it seems to be fashionable to blame the Enlightenment for every ill of the 20th Century.¹¹

Post-modernism and Deconstruction are certainly full of cleverness, though perhaps not exactly of clever argument, and so stupidity needs to be on the alert.

But although the Philosophically Stupid is instinctively inclined to side with the Enlightenment, Heracleitus was wrong after all. Every argument has to be interpreted by an individual consciousness: there is less about it that is common than one might have thought.¹² The existence of a subjective criterion of adequacy for explanations does not, of course, replace the requirement of objective correctness. Between you and me, as rational animals, finding a bad argument that convinces you is not what I aspire to. On the other hand, there's no point in my giving you an objectively good one, if you are not able to follow it. For my part, I know that if anyone explained String Theory to me in such a way that I could understand it, I could be sure they hadn't explained it right. In a sense, every argument must be made ad hominem.

To see the importance of this subjective element, consider Descartes' Cogito. This looks like an argument from "I think" to "I am". But if it is, then it stands in need of a major premise. "Whatever thinks, exists" suggests itself, but it surely won't do, since one can't at least raise a doubt about whether it is true. (Some fictional characters are remarkable thinkers.) One way of dealing with this problem, (Hintikka 1962) has suggested, is to regard the argument not just as an inference but as a performance. Asserting one's existence is "existentially self-verifying." I find this plausible, but I think the voice of stupidity can put it more simply: While I am asking myself whether I exist, there isn't anything antecedently more certain than my existence, which could figure in an argument to show I don't exist-or, for that matter, in an argument to show I do. In the first case, where the premise might be, for example, "I am being deceived by the malicious demon," my certainty that I exist is sufficient to turn the argument into a reductio, entailing the conclusion that the malicious demon, if he exists, is at any rate not deceiving me about that. In the second case, any premise purporting to link "I am thinking" to "I exist" would also have a degree of certainty no higher than the conclusion. The argument would therefore be quite pointless.

We can see, then, how (RISC'') underlies the acceptance of the Cogito: regardless of the argument one is being offered, the most reasonable course is to accept the conclusion or reject a premise, depending on which one is the least incredible. Nothing could be more obvious than my own existence, so it would never be rational either to reject it or even to accept it on the basis of anything else.

Descartes himself, however, notoriously drew a different methodological conclusion. He looked at what he had just achieved, and concluded: "I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true" (Descartes 1964-76, II-35) , and that "whatever is revealed to my by the natural light. . . cannot in any way be open to doubt" (p. 38).

But that is a mistake. For what justified the acceptance of the conclusion that I exist is a principle of rationality, not a principle about truth. Descartes is not entitled to assume that because accepting a proposition that is "clear and distinct" is the most reasonable thing to do, the truth of the proposition in question is therefore guaranteed. This fact underlines the impossibility of discovering a foundation for knowledge, and raises the question whether the role of reason itself should be always relativized to a local context of debate.

Stupidity, Reason, and Subversion

Even when suitably relativized to the epistemic standpoint of a given believer, however, some applications of the principle I have been defending threaten to undermine the results I hope for. The principle of stupidity is supposed to be subversive: but in certain cases it seems to point instead to the defense of the status quo. Ermanno Bencivenga's book-length study of Anselm's ambivalent attitude to rational argument throws this problem into sharp relief.

Bencivenga (1993) begins by posing the following riddle. When Anselm writes his famous proof of the existence of God, whom is he writing it for? He acknowledges that it will be of no use in persuading "the fool", that is the atheist. But if we take his own declarations at face value, he can't be writing it for himself either, since his own attitude to God's existence is just like that of Descartes to his own existence. Thus any argument about it is futile from the start. It is entirely redundant for those who are already convinced, and it has no chance of convincing those who are not.

So Bencivenga explores three types of motive. One ascribes to Anselm a view of philosophy as a game, "a perpetual struggle concerning what is possible," (p. 7) in the face of which "reality is beside the point" (p. 8). For one who takes that view, the elaboration of the argument may be just a theoretical exercise-a diversion, in fact, indulged in to "keep the monks busy with other than devilish thoughts" (p. 33). It shouldn't be confused with anything that touches practical life-including matters of faith-where Anselm advocates obedience, authority, and the cultivation of habit. (p. 85 ff. )

Yet in Anselm the pursuit of subtle arguments is indulged with an intensity so great as to amount, perhaps, to an addiction (p. 34). It requires a more serious justification. The second motivation, then, relates to the necessity of guarding against the tricks and pitfalls of language. Language is imprecise, ambiguous, misleading, incomplete, and these defects may be exploited by the malicious agent. (pp. 18-19). In this light, we can envisage Anselm's project as akin to those of Russell, Frege or Tarski. Clean up language, and avoid the pitfalls. Forestall the quibbles which the devil may dictate to the doubters; be able to show that all the clever arguments that might be raised by the infidels may be annihilated by using their own weapons against them. From this perspective, the point of Anselm's arguments is to reinforce authority. It is, again in Bencivenga's words, "a formidable piece of machinery that can terrorize, disconcert, and rout all enemies, real and potential, of the status quo." (p. 93)

At the very same time, though-this is the third and unavowed motivation, pitting Anselm against himself-reason "is a subtle destructuring device, able to infuse the populace with dangerous, evil questions and doubts" (ibid.). For

the practice of questioning the system in order to establish it is, after all, a practice of questioning the system, and if that is what you do, you will end up in fact working for ... the snaky, viscid deceiver who wants you to look into things and search for the knowledge of good and evil. He knows that it's enough if you get started; then the process will take over, and you will be damned. (p. 89)

how could we believe that God spares some sinners and still is just? How could we believe that the Father was not incarnate if He was one with the Son? How could we believe that the good angels are meritorious, if they are not able to sin?

It is these charges, and the Anselmian strategy against them, which pose a challenge to my doctrine of stupidity.

From my point of view as one of the "infidels", the burden of proof lies on Anselm. The charges against him stick, and Anselm's replies, "in the form of even more ingenious accounts to the effect that it could have turned out that things really had to go that way" (p. 52) are paradigms of clever arguments of the sort that philosophy ought to dismiss. Yet from Anselm's point of view, his arguments are no more than ways of squaring what he knows has to be true with reason. His arguments parallel the ones I offered above against Zeno's attack on the possibility of motion.

My defense of stupidity, therefore, seems open to the following objection:    Under the guise of "reasonable stupidity", am I not advocating Protagorean relativism? In the end, a belief is reasonable for Anselm if he believes it firmly enough, unreasonable for me if I am sufficiently convinced of its falsehood.

(RISC'') requires additional criteria of demarcation, lest it provide a pretext for allowing one's convictions to go unquestioned.

Conscientious stupidity must acknowledge that the concepts involved in one's cherished convictions may not be so clear and elementary as to be indisputable. That reservation clearly applies to some of Anselm's replies to the "infidel".

Take, for example, this challenge with Anselm's reply as reconstructed by Bencivenga:

Q: "How could we believe that it would have to happen that God be incarnate (since he had other ways of accomplishing His ends)?"

A: "Humans can do nothing to make up for their original sin-only God could-and still it is humans who have to do it because they are responsible for their situation, and somebody must do it or the whole creation would have been for nothing; therefore, there must be a god-man who does it. This is one way we can see the necessity of incarnation." (pp. 51-52)

•  That it takes as much power on the part of God to maintain the universe in existence every instant as it did to create it;
•  That the will is indivisible and infinite;
•  That existence is a perfection;
•  That all perfections are compatible.

Perhaps we should suppose that, from Anselm's or Descartes's own point of view, the complexity of these concepts was no more visible than the concept of my existence is to me when I rehearse Descartes' Cogito. But the intricacy and sophistication of their arguments makes it tempting to dismiss the supposition as ridiculous.

The Bearing of the Rationality Debate.

Suppose you accept (RISC'') as reasonable. You take a modest view of the power of reason, as enabling the individual reasoner to spot unacceptable conjunctions, but not as capable of devising a priori proofs for substantive conclusions. You therefore resist the attempts of philosophers, as much as those of theologians, to snow you with clever arguments. In short, you trust in your inferential intuitions, in your examined convictions, and in your capacity to interpret the empirical evidence.

But now, it seems, you are told by (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982) and others that some of the inferences you are natively inclined to make are systematically fallacious. How should you regard this news? Perhaps it should shake your confidence in (RISC''), since that principle, like Descartes's ambivalent reliance on the authority of individual consciousness, derives from the thought that you can't yourself do better than go with your own best judgments. If you are to second-guess yourself, you have no other tools with which too do that than the very faculty you are now doubting.

To answer this, recall the distinction between the rationality of designing an organism that does * and the rationality of doing *. Gigerenzer et al. have given plenty of good reasons to think that our strategies, whether we call them "quick and dirty" or "fast and frugal", are good ones to have. But it doesn't follow that they are, in each case, the best ones to follow. Circumstances change, and most particularly one's epistemic situation changes. Strategies that evolved to serve us under one set of epistemic constraints are not appropriate in the light of new background knowledge, and given the leisure to compute the bearing of that background.

Moreover, insofar as other strategies are not "natural" to us, there's every reason to think we can learn better ones. Reasoning is a science like any other, and the fact that we find it worth while to learn better ways of reasoning is entirely compatible with (RISC''). For when faced with evidence that I would be more likely to reach a better conclusion if I proceeded differently, it would be, not reasonably stupid, but irrationally silly not to adopt the improved strategy.

Modest Enlightenment

Whether reason can produce new truths, or whether its role is limited to the elimination of some falsehoods, is an ancient debate that goes back to Plato's two great teachers. For Parmenides, it seems mere reason is able to arrive at powerfully paradoxical findings. For Socrates, on the other hand, the "eristic method" seems best suited to expose incoherent beliefs, and the idea that coherence might eventually lead to truth is explicitly said, in the Meno (81d), to be merely a hope. Socrates is the first practitioner of reasonable stupidity, while Parmenides is the first great exponent of the clever arguments the stupid are pleased to reject.

The exhilarating ideal of Positive Reason, and the hope that the sheer power of reason could reach any rational being, has lured many philosophers into devising arguments designed to establish substantive conclusions on the basis of purely a priori premises. But we have seen that (RISC'') clashes directly with the idea that reason transcends subjective factors. For whether I can or cannot accept the substantive conclusions of an a priori argument must depend on whether it is less implausible than the rejection of (the premises or of) the argument. And that, in turn, will depend on my circumstances and my history, which will determine what seems obviously true or false to me as I approach the argument.¹³ Therefore, the demand that I be persuaded by the universal principles of reason-that I accept the conclusions of a transcendental argument, for example begs the question against (RISC'').

Someone might make this retort:

This argument is based on a simple confusion between facts and norms. The authority of reason is normative, and is changed not one whit by the mere fact that I, or anyone else, is too stubborn or too stupid to see that what it demands is rational.

But while it is easy to see that this retort is tempting,¹⁴  it won't do. For (RISC'') governs what it is rational for each person to believe, not what is transcendently true. The Enlightenment conception of universal reason cannot dictate that any given argument must secure a single reaction in all audiences, regardless of their epistemic background. What may be salvaged from it is a conception of the role of reason as negative: as able, like Socrates's eristic method, not to reveal truth but to expose falsehood, or at least rational unacceptability to a person at some time. This negative view of reason is not the minimal view: some at least, notably Hume, have claimed even less for reason: have claimed, indeed, that reason can't be relied on even to eliminate falsehood. In that light, the negative view is far from pessimistic. Negative reason remains a modest but not insignificant legacy of the Enlightenment, which philosophical stupidity can endorse in good conscience.

Coda: Amends to Descartes

I end with a note intended to correct the impression I may have given, that I regard Descartes as a villain in the struggle between oppressive cleverness and subversive stupidity. Actually Descartes, like Socrates, is among the heroes of philosophical stupidity. For while he professes all sorts of principles that seem to me absurd, he is also prescribing that my own assent to those principles is what must ground my further convictions. To be sure, he expects that by following his meditation in my own mind, I shall arrive at the same conclusions; further, he expects this because these opinions are dictated by the Light of Nature. But from my own subjective point of view, the fact that these opinions are dictated by the Light of Nature is perceptible only through the prism of their appearing indubitable to me. No separate process I can go through will distinguish what is true from what merely appears true. So if I take care to follow the meditative course Descartes prescribes, I will be doing just what is required by the ideal of philosophical stupidity I have been recommending. For despite all his humble protestations of submission to the Church, Descartes implies that, under the guidance and discipline of my individual consciousness, my own subjective judgment is the ultimate measure of God himself.

**FOOTNOTES**

¹perhaps written by Alan Sokal (or by the Automatic Postmodern Generator to be found at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern). The experiment has reportedly been conducted with psychologists as well as literary theorists.

²The name "Concorde Fallacy" has stuck to the economic fallacy also known as "sunk costs", in commemoration of the English and French governments' persistence in throwing good money after bad to support the Concorde supersonic airliner, despite predictions of continuing losses, on the ground that they had "too much invested." This is irrational, because the "sunk costs" are behind us whatever we choose, and can't affect the costs and benefits entailed by present decisions.

³See also (Wittgenstein 1969, sec. 81): "if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I undersand them."

⁴a hendiadys, of course: one thing that every religion gets right is that all the others are mere superstition.

⁵ Hence, also, the elaborate Roman Catholic procedure designed to steer a narrow path between rejecting all miracles and trivializing them. If you are going to set yourself up to believe systematic absurdities, you have to complicate the procedure very methodically, to the point where the inherent contradiction in the entreprise is lost from sight.

⁶One might object that thinking up fantastic hypotheses isn't irrational: but only insisting on believing them against the weight of evidence and argument is so. Only the former is common to science and religion. Still the underlying intellectual equipment-the capacity for invention-is required for both, and the intoxication of cleverness may account for the tendency of philosophers to prize intellectual constructions the more highly the flimsier their foundations. How else should we explain the willingness of philosophers, such as the one referred to in the next paragraph, to put their cleverness at the service of gratuitous doctrines?

⁷Some other favourites:

• - Arguments for the immortality of the soul (Plato, Descartes, et al.).
• - The Cosmological argument, in which the challenge is to obfuscate the fact that the conclusion contradicts its own premise.
• - Transcendental deductions of free-will.
• - The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles.
• - Arguments to show that no machine can ever think, be conscious, etc.
• - All arguments ever offered for the legitimacy of the state
• - Arguments purporting to justify demands for loyalty on behalf of groups, nations, etc.

⁹The following reconstruction is inspired by (Vlastos 1966), without claiming to paraphrase it accurately.

¹⁰ (Taylor 1989, 408) cites this admittedly simplistic thought from Bertrand Russell, that impartiality leads to truth in thought as in action, and to universal love in feeling.

¹¹See, for example, (MacIntyre 1981) (Toulmin and Goodfield 1990), and the book by Taylor already cited, for three examples among many. In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, (Sen 2000) comments on several of the most recent of these attacks on the Enlightenment, mentioning specifically the claim in (Glover 1999) that Stalin and Pol Pot were "in thrall to the Enlightenment".

¹²Perhaps I should be discussing idiocy, rather than stupidity, in order to exploit the linguistic fact that for the Greeks an individual was an idiotes. Although that may seem a bit cheap, there is a vital connection between what I want to defend and the idea of individualism or intellectual anarchism.

¹³If there is any tendency to doubt this, consider the Cartesian assumptions listed above. `

¹⁴I read in my school days a passage in Malebranche, which I haven't been able to find again, but of which I remember the content as going roughly thus:

"Some people, who had erroneous ideas and then gave them up, expect those whose beliefs are correct to give them up just as easily. But what they fail to see is the vast difference between firmness of mind, which is the virtue of those who are steadfast in true beliefs, and the mere obstinacy of those who cling to false doctrines."

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