Abstract
Despite everything that its title may suggest, this paper is intended as a defence of rationalism, not an attack on it. Not for the first time rationalism, like Kant in the face of Fichte, is in need of protection more from its supposed friends than from its acknowledged enemies. For many contemporary rationalists make such large claims on behalf of this fundamentally modest position as to lay it wide open to all the criticisms that irrationalists are eager to supply. My wish here is to issue a prospectus of the goods that rationalism is honestly and genuinely in a position to deliver. Everything on offer in the catalogue is currently in stock, and will remain in stock for as long as it is not found to be in any way defective.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Grover Maxwell and will appear in Science, Mind, and Psychology, edited by Mary Lou Maxwell & C. Wade Savage, Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1987. At the request of the editors of the present volume most of the original footnotes have been omitted or absorbed into the text.
An early version of the paper was read to the Philosophy Society at the University of Keele in October 1983. I am grateful to my audience there for a stimulating discussion. The paper is not much more than an elaboration of my letter [1983] to The New York Review of Books (I have not thought it worth commenting on Lieberson’s ill-mannered and inept rejoinder [1983]), deepened by the results reported in Popper’s and my letter [1983] to Nature (itself now much deepened in Popper & Miller [1987]. I thank Popper, Larry Briskman, Tom Settle, and my colleague Andrew Barker for useful advice. Some of it I have not been wise enough to heed.
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Miller, D. (1987). A Critique of Good Reasons. In: Agassi, J., Jarvie, I.C. (eds) Rationality: The Critical View. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3491-7_23
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