If you think the persuasive power of arguments is an instance of a perlocutory effect that instructs to assent to sentences, then being irrational is not precisely a pathology. Of course, as Wittgenstein pointed out about mathematical sentences, we don´t need the argumentative points in real life--we need the end result. And we do so because an argument is often entrenched with other activities: we need to agree on something in order to do something else. In order to coordinate our efforts, so to say. When a political figure, to put a wild example, refuses to accept the conclusion of a rational argument set on shared premises, he--besides being stupid on a classical sense--is calculating what other activities that are instructed by assenting to an argument's conclusion he's unwilling to do, maybe for other reasons that have nothing to do with the argument. The fact that we don't call out this by its name, but choose to render it as a case of irrationality, really makes us lose the power of rational thinking: he's not denying climate change--again, another wild example--because he's stupid, he's denying it because he's cunning.
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