Summary and Conclusion

Abstract

In order to create a better world, we need to learn how to do it. We need to learn how to resolve our conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than we do at present. And in order to do that, we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to this end. In our vast, complex, diverse, rapidly changing world, charged with conflict and injustice, there is very little hope that we will discover how to resolve our conflicts and problems in more peaceful, just and cooperative ways than at present unless we have good traditions and institutions of inquiry designed to help us learn how to do it. Cooperative action without cooperative discussion is limited in scope. When viewed from this standpoint, what we have at present—academic inquiry devoted primarily to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how (the product of the traditional Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment)—is damagingly irrational. We urgently need a new, more rational kind of inquiry, free of the blunders of the traditional Enlightenment, which takes, as a basic task, to help us build into the human world the progress-achieving methodology of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science, as depicted in this book. Traditions and institutions of learning of this type, devoted to promoting rational wisdom, would give intellectual priority to the tasks of articulating our problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible cooperative solutions, problems of knowledge and technological know-how being tackled in an intellectually subordinate way. In order to develop this urgently needed kind of inquiry we will need to change almost every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise. Above all, we will need to change social inquiry and the humanities so that they take up their proper tasks of promoting cooperative rationality in the social world. This new kind inquiry would do better justice to both practical and cultural dimensions of inquiry.