Reason - its use and abuse

Thanks to David Chapman for the link to this interesting set of articles on 'why people hate reason' from the New Scientist. An impressive line-up of authors offering some very different disciplinary perspectives. Quite a lot of common themes among the different contributors discussed in the Editorial

"The first problem our contributors have identified is not with reason itself, but with its abuse. The second unifying theme among our contributors is the concern that science and reason are increasingly seen as providing not just scientific, technical and military fixes, but answers to everything that matters in the world. Some of our contributors bring a third charge: that even on its own terms, reason must own up to some serious limitations."

....though it's concluded that

"some of the expectations of reason are ...unreasonable."

In our Open University Environmental decision making: a systems approach course we consider different approaches to decision making, some very rational others much less so. We need all the approaches so I see rational and less rational means more as a duality than a dualism. A few years ago I became aware of precision farming approaches that enabled farmers to move from intuitive to more rational approaches and findings that farmers' decision making was actually highly rational. Having worked through a lot of environmental decisions where Simon's ideas of limited rationality seemed to resonate very strongly, this research made me think, as I was becoming used to claims that we need to value intuitive approaches more highly than the strictly rational. I agree we need to accept the limitations of reason but not sure I hate reason - its clearly got users as well as abusers.