Irrationality - part I

I have often asked myself the question "What is irrationality" and how can one formally and thoroughly define it? First thought to that was that irrationality needs to be defined as the opposite of rationality, or more explicitly the lack of it.

Now that we know what exactly it is that we want to do, next question is - how? Obviously, the only way you can come up with a theory is either to build up on previous ones or to try to empirically generalize from the examples and experiences around you. Since we'll refer to little if any outside schools of thoughts, all the conclusions that will be drawn will come as an abstraction of that which we see around ourselves.

There's just another thing that needs to be laid down before we proceed any further, and that is the point of view, the perspective, because different people have very different understanding of the term "rationality". Please take a moment and consider the following examples, and try to apply your own set of values to determine which you would label as rational or irrational:

1. You are a religious person, and you fast whenever the Church tells you. No exceptions.
2. You never lie. Lying is simply bad, and should be discouraged.
3. You have a paralyzed relative who is dying and in great pain. You choose to take her life to save everyone around her from a lot of misery.
4. You are in love with the most wonderful person you know. You want to spend every waking moment of your life with him/her.
5. You have dedicated your life to fight against those who suppress you and your country, and are willing to die for the cause.

The point is that, for every item above, one can find societies in which they are considered rational, as well as irrational. So, in order to have any proper discussion about rationality, we have to choose a fixed arbiter. 

We shall choose as our arbiter any individual from a non-third world, democratic country which has an above-average living-standard, is intelligent, well-read, and open-minded. He does not believe in religion, but nor does he take any stands against it. He will lie if it's the best thing to do, but never just because of selfishness. He deems item 3 as being the rational thing to do, but would never commit such an act. He will fall in love, but admit it is an irrational feeling. He will fight against those who suppress him, but he will die for nothing. We shall concede without any proof that our arbiter is a rational person (otherwise nothing will make any sense!) - this will (hopefully) be our only axiom.

If you do a Google search for define: rationality, you can see that rationality is associated with logic, intelligence, objectivity and good judgement. I can't help feeling that defining it in terms of objectivity and being able to make a good judgement on an issue is somewhat cyclical, because it points back to the same issue of the perspective - what seems perfectly objective to me, might look the exact opposite from your eyes... but let's not waste too much time on the relativity of everything :)

I will attempt a more formal definition. Let us define a reasoning as the step-by-step logic process which you take when you attempt to argue any of your decisions. It's the way you draw your conclusions from your premises, the way you generalize and the way you link your arguments. If we ignore for a moment the fact that you can't know anything for sure, and everything you know could turn upside down at any given moment, then we could thoroughly decide if a reasoning is flawed or not, because then it is nothing more than a purely mathematical process, an algorithm if you will. Careful, I'm only talking about the process here, which in the end is nothing more than an implication "Premises implies Conclusion(s)", and any such implication (be it as complex as it may) can be mathematically decided as correct or not.

I'd like to highlight here that we're only interested in the interior reasoning which one may have, and not his/her ability to externalize it. We'll name any non-flawed reasoning a good reasoning.

One might then be tempted to conclude "rational if and only good reasoning". Unfortunately, that's far from true...

If a person has a flaw in his/her reasoning, it's irrelevant weather he/she is irrational or not, because he/she is bluntly stupid, to say the least. So we're done with that part. The problem is that you can have a good reasoning and still be irrational. I've seen many cases of intelligent people that calmly and sensibly explained good arguments for their actions, and although I knew their actions to be irrational, I was convinced that their reasoning was good. Why is that so? Why can an intelligent person, with a strong logic, be irrational?

The answer is values, and principles.

To be continued...