322 | Philip Pettit on Language, Agency, Politics, and Freedom

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We human beings like to flatter ourselves, perhaps, by thinking of ourselves as rational creatures. We all know that we're not always rational. There's a whole little subculture of rationalists trying to

convince us to become more rational. There are debates in economics about how rational actors really are and whether or not we can take irrationality into account or whether or not we should just generalize our notion of rationality, etc. But it's an old conceit that what distinguishes human beings from other kinds of animals or even other living beings is our rationality. There's a a motto that man is a rational animal that is supposed to reflect an Aristotelian way of thinking.

Aristotle himself didn't say quite those words, but he basically said things like that, and it became kind of a catchphrase, right? You know, other animals, there's a little bit of thinking involved, you know, some puzzle solving here and there, but we human beings, we're really the rational ones. One thing that follows from this perspective, even if you understand all the caveats and all the irrationalities, et cetera, it kind of puts the spotlight on our brains, or at least our inner thoughts, right? We human beings think, whether it's rationally or not, but you know, we cogitate, et cetera.

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