Appeals to reason as a faculty—or to rationality as a behaviour—often unnerve me because in my experience the appeals tend to be arbitrary or designed to intimidate. Here are three examples. First, when I was a child, whenever my mother wasn’t getting her own way, she demanded I be “reasonable”. Of course I always obeyed her. Looking back, however, I have no doubt—if I had the cheek to ask her what the demand had to do with reason—she would have gone ballistic. Second, if you look at the way many if not most positivists conduct themselves, they are a lot…