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1、BOOKS ET AL.3 JANUARY 2014 VOL 343 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 28CREDIT: LEONARD MCCOMBE/TIME AND LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGESDoes “rationality” have a career? The thesis of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind is that indeed it does. Or rather, as these authors from a Max Planck Institute for the History o
2、f Science, Berlin, working group recount, this is one of several histori- cal reinventions of what it means to be reasonable or rational. This particular life history is a largely Ameri- can one, and of the Cold War era, during which rationality became a subject nurtured within various overlapping s
3、trands of the human and social sciences. Fueled and amply funded by military interests, and feeding off a diet of mathematics, ratio- nality acquired a threatening personalacking thoughtfulness and full of its own brash band of new technologies com- pared to its older parental disciplines. The macho
4、 new American “action intellectuals” of this new rationality labeled so by histo- rian Theodore H. White ( 1) insisted that fol- lowing the rules provided by these mathema-tized technologies defined what it meant to be rational and so gave humans the best guides to action. These rule-following forms
5、 of rea- soning were perhaps one of the strongest out- comes of what have been called the cyborg sciences ( 2) and thus of whatbroadly con- ceivedmight be called the computer age. The context is critical here. But the key that unlocks our understanding of this partic- ular projection of reasoning li
6、es in seeing the Cold War conflict not as background but as source of the materials that were fed into the scientific mill. The conflict created, in imme- diate and diverse ways, the problems and test- ing grounds for the theories and practices of rationality that formed during this period and that
7、were designed explicitly for fight- ing the Cold War. It was in analyzing those problems and in creating rules for action that scientists developed the characteristics of this new, algorithmic or rule-bound, rationality. The Berlin airlift of 19489flying food in daily through the Soviet blockadeoffe
8、red an urgent problem for political and military action. It was also, in practical terms, a logisti- cal problem. The solution was bound up with the creation of operations research and linear programming, as well as computer software, and the event itself provided an exemplar for these growing speci
9、alist activities. The perennial topic of the Cuban Missile Crisis appears here too (of course), but with a new twist as an event sub- ject to competing analyses: the thesis of escalation based on the threat of MAD (mutu- ally assured destruction, the game theoretic rulesbased rationality for holding
10、 a large nuclear arsenal) ver- sus the thesis of deescala- tion (based on an account of human reasonableness and reasoning) found in GRIT (graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction). Humanity might be saved from the threat- ening and mindless rules of rationality, but those offerin
11、g alternative forms of reasoning as guides to action, such as GRITs account based on research into human perception and trust, were branded irrational when they were lined up against algorithmic rationality. We gain an immediate sense of the power of Cold War rationality in events such as these, whe
12、re the human sciences met each other at the point of such actions and where algorithmic rationality was used in the analy- sis of the crisis and its solution. It is harder to gain the same sense of what such rational- ity meant in other contexts that lacked this immediate need for technologies of ac
13、tion, even where the Cold War presence was just as pervasive. For example, we learn that there was psychological testing of whole popula- tions on certain Micronesian islands that lay within the nuclear test site region, but we get little sense of the outcomes of that research. Just what was entaile
14、d in those peoples ratio- nality? And did it matter to the bomb-testing program? How and where did these studies, and similar detailed or large-scale collections of psychological data, relate to the algorith- mic rationality of the Cold War? What is strange then about the “career of reason” in the C
15、old War? It is comforting that these chapters fit with our existing histories of human, behavioral, and social sciences; of the mathematical and technocratic demands and ambitions of those fields in the post-War American academy; and of the immense influ- ence of their military patrons on the conten
16、t and direction of their research in that time. The development of distinctive new elements in the human and social sciences in conjunc- tion with mathematics and computer science to produce cognitive science, artificial intelligence, opera- tions research, and so forth has also been charted. So has the expansion of social science game theory into evolution- ary biology. But the materials of the bo
