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Comment by degrews | Hacker News Reader

I take your point but even the current "rationalist" community (LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowski, etc.) don't seem to use the word "reasonable" in that sense.

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I'm not sure you can say that a few fringe blogs have some kind of monopoly on the concept of reason.

Of course I'm not saying anything like that. Just pointing out that the people who seem to be publicly talking about this the most also reject the use of "reasonable" as a synonym of "rational" [0] (LessWrong might be "fringe" to the general public, but is quite mainstream to people who are actually concerned about the topic of rationality).

It could be that some current academics use the word that way. I would be surprised though, I don't know why they would prefer the ambiguous "reasonable" to the established and well-defined term "rational" (I don't think this is the same as asking physicists to stop using "energy"). It's even in the Wikipedia entry for "Reason" [1]:

> The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with "rationality" and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally "rational", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable".

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g28WWuaMLXNzAnR9v/rational-v...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

>LessWrong might be "fringe" to the general public, but is quite mainstream to people who are actually concerned about the topic of rationality

No it isn't. It's not cited within any of the philosophical literature on rationality.

I missed that you were focusing on 'reasonable' in contrast to 'rational', though. Indeed, 'rational' is generally preferred in a philosophical context.

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