Rationality and social grammars

Is rationality a filter or a guide, or something else?

Projects and rationality

How does rationality function in creating social grammars?

Is rationality a filter or a guide? Does it function negatively, as a brake on pluralism and an entry guard prohibiting the acceptance of "irrational" suggestions for novelty? Or does it function positively as a guide suggesting new directions for self-change? Neither of these seem adequate, for they have positive suggestions coming only from irrational sources.

Could there be a third choice? If a project fails there might be a demand for a more justified alternative. Robert Pippin sees justification that way, with guidance coming from the fact that deep down there is only one goal, self-conscious freedom, which becomes clearer as a goal over time.

So a large question is whether there is an overall project that can be shown to be necessary, or to be discovered in the failures of local projects as the underlying reason for the failures. Then that underlying goal can itself be taken as a project, self-consciously, which is what it then means to be modern, a la Weber and Habermas?

Even if this were so, the difficulty would be the application of the overall goal to the particulars of any local situation. That seems to call for Aristotelian practical wisdom rather than some necessary development.

• [Nearby: Gateway -- A modern error -- Norms and communities ]