Karl Popper defines rationality as: basing beliefs on logical arguments and evidence. Irrationality is everything else.
He also defines comprehensive rationality as: only logical arguments and evidence are valid basis for belief. But this belief itself can only be accepted by choice or faith, so comprehensive rationality is self-contradictory. It also excludes a lot of useful knowledge. This, he says, is worse than irrationality.
It reminds me of some arguments for typed functional programming. We must have proof our programs are correct! We must make incorrect programs impossible to represent in compiling code! But this excludes a lot of useful programs. And do we even know what ‘correct’ is? Not in UI development, that’s for sure.
Pure functional programming eschews side effectsy (like printing output or writing data). Yet it is these side effects that make programs useful, that let’s them impact the world. Therefore, exclusively pure functional programming is worse than irrationality (all dynamic, side-effecting programming).
Popper argues instead for critical rationality: Start with tentative faith in premises, and then apply logical argument and evidence to see if they hold up. Consider new possible tenets, and see whether they hold up better. This kind of rationality accepts that there is no absolute truth, no perfect knowledge, only better. Knowledge evolves through critical argument. We can’t get to Truth, but we can free ourselves from some falsehoods.
This works in programming too. Sometimes we do know what ‘correct’ is. In those cases, it’s extremely valuable to have code that you know is solid. You know what it does, and even better, you know what it won’t do. Local guarantees of no mutation and no side effects are beautiful. Instead of ‘we don’t mutate parameters around here, so I’ll be surprised if that happens’ we get ‘it is impossible for that to happen so I put it out of my mind.’ This is what functional programmers mean when they talk about reasoning about code. There is no probably about it.
Where we can use logical arguments and evidence, let’s. For everything else, there’s JavaScript.
