Status Updates From Return to Reason

The price of living in the world of the pragmatists and the skeptics is the need to acknowledge that our best-founded beliefs are still uncertain. Neither physics nor psychology can do what the rationalists hoped. Dreamers tempts us with their images, but only as poetry. When the dreams of theory no longer cloud our expectations, we are back in a world of practical hopes and fears.

Inarticulate knowledge must not be despised: we grasp theoretical ideas only if we have sufficient experience to give them meaning. To change the image, pre-verbal knowledge is the root from which intellectual claims get their sense; the words in which we make those claims are, rather, their top growth.

One aspect of the standard view of "rationality" is the assumption that a single method can turn any field of inquiry into a "hard science" like physics. A more balanced view will allow any field of investigation to devise methods to match its problems, so that historical, clinical, and participatory disciplines are all free to go their own ways.

...it was necessary to rethink both the language of economic theory and the actual practices of economic activity, if your were to match the actual situations on the ground.

If the square root of 2 is rational, it can be written as p/q where p and q are whole numbers and have no common factor. If p is even, then q must be odd, or they would have 2 as a common factor. If p is odd, q may be either even or odd, but they must have no common factor, whether 2 or otherwise.