Technical vs. Practical Rationality: Concepts & Applications

Technical vs. Practical Rationality

1 - The concept of technical rationality:

a) Animal behavior adaptation to the drive for survival can be considered an example of technical rationality to the extent that it is a skill used to achieve a certain purpose. Humans use this kind of rationale for self-preservation or self-assertion, to obtain benefits or follow dictates of vanity.

b) When humans apply this kind of rationality, it's about controlling power over our environment, external nature, or other humans. To the extent that we use something as a means to our ends, we objectify it, even a subject, i.e., a person. That is why technical rationality is strategic or instrumental and is guided by criteria such as efficiency, economy (media and effort), and is success-oriented.

2 - Technical rationality and the rationalization process:

a) Technical rationality was decisive in the genesis of the modernization process that arose in the West between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and that accompanies the process of civilization that produced the first modern civilization in the history of humanity. Since the modern era (sixteenth century) in Europe, technical rationality with its logic has been submitting more and more extensive areas of traditional lifestyles, transforming them according to modern ways of doing and understanding things. Thus, forms of economy, production, knowledge, or political power characteristic of the traditional European world were replaced by capitalism, industrialization, modern science, or bureaucracy as applications of technical rationality.

b) Technical rationality has been instrumental in the process of secularization of the West, that is, in the process of replacing the traditional religious or metaphysical worldviews with secular forms of understanding reality, i.e., without appeal to supernatural or divine forces. This has led to the first secular civilization in the history of humanity, resulting from the privatization or confinement of faiths, churches, sects, and religious movements.

3 - Practical rationality: the distinction between the rational and reasonable:

a) The rational is the same as general scientific thought. It is those judgments that are a matter of demonstration or testing, and whose truth or falsity depends on empirical evidence or logic. The rational, to the extent that it depends on a conclusion by logical reasoning or empirical evidence, is impersonal and therefore can be prosecuted in absolute terms of truth or falsehood, so that only a proposition of which claim to be true may be true.

b) It is reasonable to follow suit of law, morality, and politics. It refers to all those judgments that are a matter of justification by such decisions or assessments, and therefore supported proposals as valid. The reasonable thing is based on scientific rationality, but also in philosophical, religious, aesthetic, legal, political, etc., contributions.

4 - Practical reasoning:

a) The rationale seeks to know the things to find out how best to get by them, while reasonable attempts to communicate with the subjects to arbitrate with them the best way to convivivir humanly. When our decisions and assessments affect others, personal subjective reasons are not sufficient, but those that are expressed to others as a justification of choices or decisions. It is called practical reasoning that justifies a decision or an assessment by arguments.

b) The criterion for determining the degree of reasonableness of practical reasoning is the consensus that this obtains. There would be two types of consensus:

• Consensus irrational: forced agreement is obtained through manipulation and coercion, the arguments of special interest or represent any ideological position.
• The rational consensus: free agreement is obtained only by appealing to reason in time to argue, trying to get in the place of any other human being in general. This consensus would try to assert generalizable interests.