Rationalism versus irrationalism is beside the point. What really matters is this: what is the scope of what can be achieved with rational thought?

Today, every reasonable person accepts that we cannot reason out what nature is and how it ought to behave and expect nature to conform to our conclusions. (However, through various combinations of skillful manipulation grounded in understanding and force we can compel nature to conform to our wishes.)

A smaller but still significant number of people accept that we cannot reason out what human beings are and how they ought to behave and expect actual human beings to conform to our conclusions. (However, as with nature, through various combinations of skillful manipulation grounded in understanding and force we can compel people to conform to our wishes.)

But these days I am having trouble believing even that reason alone can bring groups of people to agree on any important matter.

This is not to say that reason is dispensable. On the contrary, it is completely crucial. However, reason alone is not sufficient. To resolve important matters we cannot just speak knowledgeably about the matters in question (let alone speculate on them!), but involve the matter itself in our dialogue and give it a voice and interact with it. This is true of predominantly material questions, predominantly subjective questions, and questions involving combinations of material and subjective factors, which are far and away the most common and most important questions we face.

We must experiment together in collaboration with the very realities that are in question. To put it in business slang, we must “keep the reality in the loop.”

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Maybe dialogue is at its height when it comes to agreement not on truth itself, but on experiments that ought to be performed to determine an as-yet-undetermined truth.

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For many years we all thought experimentation was a cure for the disease of delusion, when in fact experimentation is a fitness regimen to grow and maintain agreement.

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