Reason and Rational Knowledge

Overview

Economic theories, as well as theories of management and organizations, appeal continually to “rationality,” although this is seen solely as a calculative capacity to select efficient means.

Drawing from Aristotle, we can distinguish three types of rationality: instrumental, practical, and speculative or theoretical — all of them relevant to management.

Rationality entails a specific capacity for understanding, termed “reason,” which is precisely the key feature that distinguishes humans from other animals, as noted in the last chapter. Reason is a philosophical category, different from what psychologists call “intelligence,” which covers a range of different aspects and varies from one individual to another.

According to Aristotle, knowledge is not innate but starts in the senses and intuition. The information generated by these, along with one’s own memory and experience, contributes to the formation of ideas or concepts by abstraction. We construct judgments by using concepts to make assertions about reality. A third stage in developing rational knowledge is when we reason by applying logic to what we know. Currently, we distinguish among deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning as complementary forms of rational knowledge.

There are other theories of the way in which we acquire rational knowledge (epistemology). Among them are empiricism, rationalism, Kantian idealism, and constructivism. The Aristotelian approach is now presented as “critical realism.”