>And who, pray tell, gets to define what rational argumentation is? :-)
>
>
No one, really: the notion of "rational argumentation" derives from the
work of many philosophers, addressing the matter of how to use reason in
order to understand the Universe. Some rhetorical methods are effective
at obfuscating, or misleading people (say, the _ad hominem_ argument),
while others can provide useful or even valuable insights (the structure
of a double-blind experiment and the requirement of falsifiability). No
_one_ person defined "rational argument."
>I once saw two physicists, one a Nobel Prize winner, nearly destroy an
>overhead projector in the course of intense and very abstract/rational
>argument debating the minutae of Bell's theorem. The invective was
>palpable in the room.
>
>We need to learn a lot more about our brains/bodies before we can come to
>some consensus on just what rational argumentation consists in/of.
>
Well, an awful lot of our concepts of rationality were developed
_because_ of our understandings of our own brains and bodies. For
example, we understand that an individual's perceptions may be flawed,
or in error, or unduly influenced by personal needs or desires; that's
why science requires that experiments be repeatable by other individuals
using the same methods. (Blondlot's N-rays are a fine example of this.)
We've developed instruments which enable us to observe the Universe in
ways other than that of our five senses (radio-telescopes,
spectrometers, computer image-enhancement, etc.) as well as intellectual
tools to guide us in ways which avoid the fallacies which humans are
prone to (mathematics, "falsifiability," etc.)