1998
There are many more than one kind of "reason": though only one small set is state of the art reason.You argue with your wife. Each of you believes the other to be unreasonable. Is one wrong and the other right? Could both of you be right? How about: could both of you be wrong? You've got to define reason, always allowing that different interests will have different definitions.
"I mean philosophy in its practical sense, of course. You can be reasonable as hell and still be a damned fool."
Piers Anthony
Refreshing as that dialogue is, I hope the visitor sees that a different reason is being referenced. That's the "reason" we all grew up with; not the reason we must learn.
In The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards argued that the closer a word was to the core of a language, the more impossible it was to define. It's easy to define a "button"; hard to get at the essence of "beauty." It becomes more complicated when words get drafted by specialties. My high school physics teacher defined "work" as "force" through "distance." Then she told us that if we pushed against a wall all day long but the wall stayed where it started, we weren't doing any "work." We were confused. Even indignant. It was years before I could pinpoint and articulate her error: the physicists can follow any definition they want; but they don't own the common language. The physicists could mean what they mean; so too could we mean what we meant. Let them police their own halls, not ours.
And natural languages have no authority. Period.
(In English, "two plus two" "means" "four." In some other language the same sounds could be nonsense or could mean "salt," or something we don't have a concept for, let alone a word. Is it our business to "correct" them? Is it theirs to "correct" us?)
It's trickier yet with a word like Reason. Reason is in the common language. And has been taken up by many specialties. It's my argument throughout Waterman's domains that reason is one word for which we'd all do well to know some of the specialists' meanings. Laissez-faire is fine until the doing-their-own-thing of some endangers the life of all. For some time now I've been convinced that the behavior of most is a danger to all.
(Democracy, the deifying and ratifying of the majority, may kill everything faster than any horde of priests, Huns, Mongols, or Communists ever could.)
Scientists form a group which talks about its devotion to truth. So do any number of groups, including religions and political parties. Like the rest of us, scientists sometimes posture and bluster about it. Like the liberal arts scholars, the religions, and the political parties, scientists also garner evidence in support of their views. How then are they different? Ah! As cited in more than one elsewhere of Waterman's domains, scientists comprise the only group (correct me if you know of another) which makes a habit (as well as a virtue) of going out of its way to disprove their theories, to find fault with their evidence. It's only so long as all such efforts fail that a theory is accepted.
When I can I'll return here to go over the relationship between reason and logic, basic types of reasoning: deduction, induction, abduction ... homeopathic logic, etc.
Notes
(Reason Scrapbook follows below Notes)
Wrong:
The idea of being right can have little substance unless you also have what most of us naturally lack: the idea that we can be wrong. Human beings trust the authorities recognized since the cradle. Science gives us the difficult idea that there is no authority but the evidence: evidence interpreted by theories that must constantly be tested for their wrongness. (That's what was missing in the epistemology I learned in Sunday School.)
Peter Wason distilled this idea into a very simple test.
What Murray Gell-Mann reports not discovering, or even looking for, until he was doing post-doc work at MIT, was an important scientist changing his mind in the face of new evidence. (A superior interpretation of old evidence amounts to the same thing in this context.)
What most of us do when the facts are against us is stonewall. Equivocate. Bluster. Invent new lies. Hire a new image manager.
This needs to develop into an "essay" of its own.
Four: language games
Those of you who know Wittgenstein's work will not only recognize the point as his, but will identify the example as an homage.
Specialties: changing definitions
Korzybskian semantics apply with even more urgency in the case of specialties. Korzybski used his own book as an example. He published Science and Sanity in 1933. Each of his contributions should be understood to carry a little flag: science1933. It would take longer than the age of the universe to read a single word with all the flags needed to approach precision: even "1933" is very rough. My own name and this date (to the nanosecond) together with this URL should be added to my own reference.
Heraclitus said that you cannot put your foot into the same river twice. Not only it is different water flowing by, but the channel too will have changed, if only by a grain of sand. He could have added that you can't put the same foot into the same river twice. Exhaled, we are quantitatively different than when inhaled: by around a trillion air molecules. If we could solve the meaning of the patterns of our firing of neurons, I bet we'd see that we are qualitatively different as well.
Let me give a few examples somewhat more obvious:
Take architecture. An ancient Egyptian architect would understand stone, even post and lintel stone. He'd be thrown by domes. What would he think he was looking at if he saw Chartres? What would the builders of Chartres think if they saw steel and glass architecture? Or the cantilevered concrete of Frank Lloyd Wright?
(As already said elsewhere, I sure didn't know what I was seeing on encountering a Ken Snelson needle tower: and wouldn't know till a decade later when Bucky Fuller explained it to me.)
Take gravity. Your average person still thinks it means "what goes up must come down." But your average cave man believed that. So what did Newton discover? That all matter is mutually attractive. So what about Einsteinian gravity? A group of three people — a banker, a high school physics teacher, and a hyperstring theorist are likely to mean different things by gravity. The banker isn't likely to know to say gravitystone age. The teacher might know to say gravityNewtonian. The hyperstring guy will definitely know to say gravityquantum.
Only: imperfect theories
Only math can be brief and accurate (or Shakespeare) at the same time. I've simplified my presentation and put the disclaimer here.
The greater the theory, the more important, the more likely it is to have holes yet nevertheless be accepted by rational people as Theory. The originator of the hypothesis may know of the holes. The defenders of the theory may legitimately say that they believe that additional tests or a few minor alterations will fix it.
If theories had to fit my simplified presentation "perfectly," we'd have very few of them.
Evolution is an example of a theory still rife with problems where there's still no serious doubt as to it's "essential" correctness.
River: abstract vs. concrete
That's if we're nominalists. If we're Realists, then we must understand the river to be not the flowing water we put our foot into, but something abstract. In that case, we couldn't ever put our foot into different rivers: difference would exist only in the illusions of shadows.
Reason Scrapbook
Reasoning can be no better
Than the theory reasoned with
The legislature "defines" what constitutes "reasonableness." The natural languages have been around a lot longer than any legislatures. A number of specialties have differing methods for determining what words mean. Then there are the specialized, artificial languages. Specialists there define terms. There’s an analogy with legislatures, except that the specialists emerge (theoretically) from among peers; they are not elected by the general public. Only in specialized languages can meanings be autocratically updated.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
G K Chesterton
G K Chesterton
I use the term reason liberally at this home page, typically specifying "modern reason." Let me review what I mean by it: what I believe a plurality should come to mean by it. I begin by repeating two references ubiquitous at Waterman: Gregory Bateson and Peter C. Wason.
The Wason Test has devised a simple way to determine whether people have added the concept of "falsification" to their "common sense." By Waterman’s standards, if you haven’t, you aren’t reasonable: regardless of what the law says. You must look for evidence in support of your hypotheses: what we all do naturally: but you must also seek evidence against your hypothesis. Goes against the grain, doesn’t it?
Gregory Bateson opened his magnificent Mind and Nature with an exquisite list of "things" every school boy ought to know: elementary ideas relevant to evolution and to almost any other biological or social thinking ...
I reread Bateson’s list for the first time in years as I copy it (having read it many times previously, recognizing its excellence on my first reading in 1979) and see even more than I already knew that those terms are very much what Waterman's Thinking Tools are concerned with. I say that if you would be reasonable by contemporary standards if you can account for terms such as those above in a way that would be recognized as adequate by the specialists. If you can’t, I say you are not up to snuff, are a bad teacher, a poor parent, an irresponsible citizen.
Any man will listen to reason for a while, but when the passions rise,
reason is as quickly forgotten as the graffiti in a shit house.
Robert Anton Wilson
reason is as quickly forgotten as the graffiti in a shit house.
Robert Anton Wilson
If mankind wished to survive (rather than to die rich), I believe we should make competence with both the Wason Test and Bateson’s list criteria for citizenship. A lot of Ph.D.s would no longer be allowed to vote. Almost no congressmen would be allowed to remain in office. Courtrooms would be closed to many judges and lawyers. A vast majority of teachers would be swept from the lectern to the students’ seats (or out the door if no teacher (as is likely) qualifies).
If a coalition of scientists and philosophers ever grouped together, all passing the Wason Test, I might reconsider my position against both coercion and genocide. A great crime by a few, should it prolong human survival till the remainder might evolve into something more viable, might be one time that an end might justify a means.
Fact ... Evidence ... Proof ...
Such concepts require an epistemology at least roughly agreed upon.
Such concepts require an epistemology at least roughly agreed upon.
I am for certain kinds of reason, am contemptuous of certain other kinds, am victim to all kinds ... want to distinguish among kinds. I plan to add a Reason folder to my Society directory, caricaturing the only kind of reason many of us ever encounter: rationalization, justification (for state misbehaviors), "reason" used to interrupt or confuse thought, to cover for lack of thought, to impose decisions without analysis ...
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