Rarely in inquiry does one get a satisfying answer to the skeptic. They are as inescapable as one’s own shadow, waiting patiently for the right moment to begin delivering their interminable “why?”. You think you can trust your perceptions? Why should you? Might you not be deceived? Why think you aren’t? Rarely can we come up with a satisfying response. But, in at least one case, we can.

“Why be rational?”. A common thought, maybe, one which flits through the minds of anybody agonizing over some decision, drafting up elaborate lists of pros and cons, when they’d really just like to make a choice. A fitting thought, in other words, for a Hamlet. Perhaps an aesthetic or moral rejoinder, a reminder that there’s more to life than just reason and logic and valid deductions – an injunction to just live a little, stop worrying about it. A laugh in the face of the principle of sufficient reason, which holds that for each thing there must be a sufficient reason which explains its existence. In any case it’s a question which can be formulated, and one which may even have strong motives for its formulation.

But unlike most other skeptical questions it admits of simple rejoinder. To put it briefly: the skeptic of rationality, in their demand for a reason to be rational, engages in performative contradiction. They are caught in a dilemma. Either they are formulating a genuine inquiry, in which case they have already accepted the validity of rationality – for rationality just is (at least in part) the practice of providing reasons for belief. Or they are not formulating a genuine inquiry, even though their utterance grammatically takes the form of one. In this case they cannot substantively articulate what they mean by their question, for how else can “why be rational?” be answered except with a reason? Either way, the skeptic is in a double bind – either their question is an intelligible inquiry into reasons, in which case rationality has already been presupposed, or it isn’t an intelligible inquiry into reasons, in which case the question can’t even be asked in the first place. Regardless of which option the skeptic chooses, they fail to meaningfully critique or challenge the validity of rationality.

It may be useful, at this juncture, to introduce another figure to compare the skeptic against: the wild person. The wild person lives alone in some imagined state of nature. Like the skeptic they ostensibly have no positive beliefs about the issue in question. They have no doctrine of the relation between perception and reality. But unlike the skeptic they do not demand one, either. For them it never enters into the realm of thought, never becomes formulated as a concern. And, unlike the skeptic, they do not ask for reasons. One can imagine them outside the space of reason, acting and thinking according to instinct or intuition instead. To choose the second horn of the dilemma outlined above – to accept that the question, “why be rational?”, does not commit oneself already to the validity of rationality – is to adopt the perspective of the wild person. Rationality genuinely fails to be authoritative for the wild person, but this no more poses a challenge to rationality than does the existence of animals.