entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 78 ] The Present
tions of decision science and the "rational man" popularized by Herbert
Simon. The connections between the rational man of economics, the
artificial man of AI research, the pure scientist, and the perfect soldier are
numerous. All these creatures share a common heritage. At their core are
the same metarules of individuality, rationality, masculinity, and domination.
All of them are supposed to rely on logic, not emotion, for solving their
problems. Relying on the "intellectual technologies" of systems analysis,
management science, and related techniques to measure the costs versus
benefits or economic expected utility, decision scientists claim they have
created "a social-scientific approach to decision making." Have some knowledge
engineers put it all into a machine and you have an expert system.
In her analysis of Simon's work, Carolyn Miller (1990) reveals how it is
focused on the metaphor of rationality in both economics and AI. Economic
expected utility, complexified to multiattribute analysis and rational decision
making, is now called problem solving. This has been Simon's focus for fifty
years, although he conflates it to "The nature of human reason...." Miller
goes on to show how Simon's idea of rationality is "instrumentalist," in that
Simon has replaced "Olympian Rationality" (omniscient and absolute) with
procedural rationality. She calls this "scientistic" and contrasts it to her idea
of reasonable rationality, that is, "the discovery and articulation of good
reasons for belief and action." So, in Miller's terms, history, convention,
insight, emotion, and value all become rational, that is, possible "good
reasons" for thinking or doing something.
History? Insight? Emotion? Value? These elements are difficult to formalize,
to put it mildly. Unsurprisingly, vulgar rationality remains dominant
in many guises in many related discourses: the short-term rationality of our
politico-military affairs with its roots in economic metaphors of material gain
and loss (Chomsky, 1986) and the limited rationality of the bureaucracy, the
computer, the man-on-the-street.
Which isn't you or me. He is the computer model of the average
consumer, voter, soldier, investor, or enemy; he is the rational man of
economics, the "rational opponent" Henry Kissinger calls him. Kissinger
defines him as someone who "must respond to his self-interest in a manner
which is predictable" (quoted in Falk, 1987, p. 16). Being predictable by
Henry Kissinger is rational? Some feminist philosophers have argued it is only
a limited type of rationality, and it is predicated on relationships of domination.
To show some of these relationships clearly and with their deeper
structure, it will help to look at the critique of the role of limited versions of
rationality in science that comes specifically from Carolyn Merchant and
Sandra Harding.
Merchant (1982) draws convincing lines between limited conceptions
of rationality that are central to science and an attitude and practice toward
nature of domination, dismemberment, even destruction. Given the con-