Rationalism
The Basic Idea
Texting and driving. Virtually everybody who has a driver’s license can admit they’ve done it, despite knowing how dangerous it is.
And despite the millions spent on distracted driving campaigns, erecting billboards and increasing law enforcement on the roads, we still do it. Why? Because employing rationality isn’t always easy, especially when temptation exists around us.
In an era of contention and opposing headlines, using rationality can be a kind of opinion hygiene, a means of shedding misjudgments and motivated reasonings. In a time of partisan divide and views that tend toward the extreme, it promises to make sense of what’s grounded in fact and what isn’t. When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. Using rationality is vital to that understanding.1
Rationalism reflects a reliance on reason—the philosophical idea that the fundamental starting point for all knowledge is not found in the senses or in experience, but instead can be traced back to some innate knowledge that we’re born with.2 This ‘original knowledge’ creates first principles, and the Rationalist epistemological school of thought purports that anything that can be logically deducted from those first principles is how we build our knowledge.
