Publishing Web for Students' Final Papers
Publishing Web for Students' Final Papers |
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From: Angela Cheong
Email: waiyinn@cats.ucsc.edu
Course: Psych 100G: Issues of Diversity in Developmental
Psychology
College: Crown College, UCSC
Instructor: Eugene Ematusov
ClassWeb: http://www.ematusov.com/psych100G
ChildrenObservations: No
Date: 13 Dec 1996
Time: 04:19:26
Remote Name: tsb-63.ucsc.edu
In the group project, the development of rationality was separated into a brief discussion of what rationality was observed to be as well as the role cognitive, sociocultural and moral development play in the thinking process. In this paper, my object is to look into our difficulty in defining what rationality is. I do feel that it is not uncommon to leave our concept of rationalization as unclear or undefined because rationality itself is a normative concept.
Acknowledgments
I have benefited from comments and suggestions on different parts of my paper due to my associates May, Jenny and Angelina fruitful discussions and sharing of ideas. I am grateful to being able to experience growth in my understanding through this learning process and to have fun doing so. I would also like to thank those who participated in the class web for their helpful comments to further my understanding the process of learning.
"There is a difference between reason as a process and what any person or group of people at any time in history may regard as ‘the reasonable’". -Nathaniel Branden (1984)
In the group project paper, my associates and I looked at the act of rationalization as a universal process of thought justification but we also saw the process as a diverse one. We acknowledge their diversity as being the foundation to the reasons that they are formulated using our own knowledge and experiences. There were many discussions of trying to actually to look at all aspects of rationality but because it is so diverse, confusion as to how to actually write out our paper became a difficult task.
From my point of view, I feel that it is a mistake to actually define rationality without looking into our own judgments values due to its diversity. We assemble our concepts through the process of breaking down the situation, analyzing them and breaking them down to their basic components to find a suitable solution for our better understanding. The concepts may be used to summarize elements of specific actions or associate them to certain characteristics or features of a similar system. When using these concepts, we adopt a system of stratification or hierarchy in the ways we process our rationalization processes (Bjordal).
In school we are taught the basics of whatever subject(s) we were involved in. We are given concepts to remember but we can only assume the concepts are correct or applicable from the starting points. In order to accept the concepts, we have to be governed by the concepts’ logical rules. Therefore when we assess a certain theorem to be rational, we are already judging them to be good to the attainment of a concept. Geometry starts us out with proving a theorem by finding reasonable or logical explanations to justify why the theorems are right on the point. We take on a simple problem where its organization is simple and we always obtain the results we want because some way or another we assimilate them into what we want to look for.
Later on in college we are taught to reanalyze these theorems and find some logical reasons to their authenticity by disproving its antithesis or alternate hypothesis therefore once again strengthening our beliefs in the logic of the hypothesis in the first place. Then how should we deal with the concept of our guiding rationale? We do need a certain basis for our knowledge in order to assess what we should do next. That’s where our own experiences come into play. If an action is foreseen with better consequences than other actions, rationality provides the basis to move ahead to achieve a better result (Nathanson, 1993). The content of the what is acceptable and what is not is based on an individual’s diverse experiences. In order to accept what is deemed rational or not, questions must be put forward in order to challenge the hypothesis.
References
Bjordal, Frode: University of Tromso, Norway frodeb@fil.isv.uit.no Truth in perspective.
Branden, Nathaniel 73117.607@comuserve.com Copyright 1984, Association for Humanistic Psychology.
Nathanson, Stephan. 1985. The ideal of rationality. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.
