Many critiques of rationalism feel circular to me. The limitations or flaws of rational thinking are often pointed out in beautifully clear arguments, but they all implicitly rest on top of a substrate of some rationality-like framework. This of course is not a new problem, nor is it an issue encountered just with critiques of rationalism. The generalized problem is an ancient question in epistemology that many philosophers have contended with, which is about how knowledge can be bootstrapped. The Münchhausen trilemma gives a modern, concise summary of the broader problem, but I want to look at a tiny niche case of it here. In order to engage in any productive thinking and discourse, we need some basic form of common intellectual framework, which is often rationality, but if so, how can we effectively critique rationality using itself?

One way to address this problem is by restricting the definitions. This is the method that In the Cells of the Eggplant uses. Although the author does not explicitly acknowledge this problem (it’s not the primary concern of the book), he does successfully skirt around it, in my opinion, albeit in a slightly “cheating” way. Essentially, rationality in the book is taken as the more naive, radical version of rational thinking, the belief that rigid, universal logical frameworks of reasoned arguments can fully explain the world. This version of “rationality” then becomes the target of critique on rational thinking. The concept of “reasonableness” is introduced, as the much less rigid, less formal, common-sense style reasoning that people use in everyday life. From examining the strengths and flaws of both of these perspectives, the author arrives at their culmination, a third and final perspective, where the “rational” meets the “reasonable” in the “meta-rational”.

For those interested, a good summary of these ideas from The Eggplant can be found here, but that’s not the focus here. What’s important for this discussion is that this author has managed to solve the circular reasoning or bootstrapping problem of rationalism critique. By limiting the idea of “rational thinking”, we have suddenly gained some extra room for intellectual maneuverability. The extra space allows us to take an outside perspective on “rationalism”, and to point out its limitations and flaws properly.

Even though it works, and the critiques of rational thinking by the author are sublime, I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a cheat. We didn’t actually gain any additional space in our perspective, we simply made our subject of concern smaller. It’s like buying smaller furniture to make an apartment look bigger. Perhaps I feel this way because my view of “rational thinking” was not as restrictive, and had always been closer to “meta-rational thinking”. But regardless, the question remains: with what perspective can we then critique “meta-rationalism”? Maybe it’s not a question that can be answered. Maybe it’s not even a question that should be asked, because meta-rational is the ultimate way of thinking. Maybe the most bottom layer of foundation of our thoughts, the most abstract, meta aspects of reasoning and logic (i.e. the “Logos”), is innate. Maybe the Logos is either hardwired in us as some biological structure, or is a manifestation of some some fundamental law of physics¹.

Or maybe there is an “alternative stack” to the traditional form of reasoning and logic that we have not found yet. It sounds implausible, but the existence of such alternative frameworks in mathematics makes me a bit optimistic. The $p$-adic number system, for example, is an alternative way of extending the ordinary arithmetic of rational numbers, that is fundamentally different from the system that we are used to. It alters the concept of distance (i.e. $|a - b|$) between numbers: instead of basing it on how close they are on the traditional number line, it is based on the size of the power that their difference is divisible by. This alternative number system was only discovered recently (in early 20th century), and despite its complete unintuitiveness, it turned out to be extremely useful. The system encodes an entirely different kind of information, congruence, instead of traditional “closeness”, that it provided us with a different perspective to look at numbers with. This is pretty close to “making the apartment bigger”, and it famously played a pivotal role in Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

So now I wonder: what would an alternative system of reason look like, and how can it be used to critique “traditional” rational thinking?