RATIONALITY AND ITS FINITUDE

Resumen

RATIONALITY AND ITS exercise is intrinsically finite. This general thesis, though debatable, is hardly new. Nor do all those who advance it understand it in the same way. In this brief paper I wish to specify one sense of this thesis and, without claiming to have definitively proven that this sense of the general thesis is true, to provide something of a justification for holding it. I will conclude by pointing out one of the important implications of the case I make here. I do not claim that the sense of the intrinsic finitude of rationality with which I deal here is either the only or even the most fundamental of the senses in which this general thesis can be legitimately held.

Briefly stated, the particular thesis that I wish to explore is: Rationality and its exercise is intrinsically finite because the exercise of rationality involves at least two mutually dependent, but distinct and irreducible, functions, namely the dogmatic function and the critical function. These functions cannot be taken to be either facets or dependent moments of one more fundamental operation. Nor is one of these functions definitively subordinable to the other. The justification for holding this particular thesis in considerable measure arises from the explication of precisely what the thesis involves and the assumptions that are implicit in it.