From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Thanks very much for joining us. And if you're not already, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave us a nice review. Now, in an age when so much of our public discourse seems to openly defy reason, and when the defining values of the post-enlightenment world we seem to take for granted are increasingly under challenge, this week we're going to talk about the state of our intellectual health as a modern society. And I'm pleased to say that my guest this week is especially well equipped to talk about this. It's Stephen Pinker. Professor Pinker is one of our foremost public intellectuals and has written extensively in defense of both reason and the Enlightenment, they being subjects of two of his most recent books. In his latest work, Rationality, which the paperback edition is now out, he examines how we as humans use reason, but also how and why we don't.

He notes that rationality is under siege from many quarters of society these days with the rise of

fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative truths, and a growing campaign to subordinate the

idea of reason to the demands of diversity and identity. Professor Pinker is the professor of

psychology at Harvard University and has written

extensively about language, cognition, theory of mind, and many other topics. Among his other books

was a 2011 bestseller, the best angels of our nature that argued in keeping with his strong

belief in the power of reason and enlightenment values that despite our often lurid way of

covering the news, violence has declined over centuries of human history.

The world is a much secure and safer place than it was. And Professor Stephen Pinker joins me now. Thank you very much indeed for joining me, Professor. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. I want to get interested to some of those broader contemporary societal questions we face in which reasons seems to be under challenge. But you spend a lot of time in the book, which is extremely helpful for those of us who've forgotten our logic and other topics that we learned a long time ago as undergraduates, explaining what reason is, how it works, how we exercise it, and how sometimes we don't. So I thought I just start off, if I may, by just asking you the very simple question to, as do you do at the start of the book, explain what we mean when we talk about reason and reasoning? I define reason as the use of knowledge to pursue goals. So reason

is always in service of a particular goal, and it's a way of using benchmarks of rationality,

intellectual tools that indicate how a rational agent ought to reason in order to attain his or her goals.

They serve as yardsticks against which we can compare how mortal humans actually do things.

So by these normative models, I include logic, how you deduce new true beliefs from existing

true beliefs, probability theory, how you assess the likelihood of an event, how you deduce new true beliefs from existing true beliefs, probability theory,

how you assess the likelihood of an event, how to distinguish correlation from causation,

game theory, namely how a rational agent should attain his goals in a world of other rational

agents trying to attain their goals. The statistical decision theory, that is how do we trade off

false alarms from misses, given that we are not omniscient. We have to make educated guesses about the

state of the world. We can say we detect something or not, and we can be wrong in one of two ways.

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