What are the Limits of Reason?

Reason is a powerful tool for understanding the world and finding truth, but it's not without its flaws. In this episode, we'll look at the importance of critical thinking in daily life and how it applies to philosophical inquiry. What happens when reason alone isn’t enough? Join us as we explore the edges of rational thought and the mysteries that lie just beyond.

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Transcript

Did you know there is a device? It's a sort of crystal ball that accurately and relatively reliably predicts the future? No, it doesn't run on magic. Although what it does can seem pretty darn magical. This device isn't technological either. In fact, it's not really mysterious to you at all. If you're listening to this podcast, you have one yourself.. This device is your mind, and it runs on reason. It's pretty miraculous, actually. Your mind literally allows you to imagine future events accurately enough that you can take action. It's not perfect. And like any other device, it can sometimes use a good tune-up. So, stay tuned if you want to find out how philosophy can polish your crystal ball. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Reason is our best possibility for discovering truth, understanding, and through those, a good life, but it has its limitations and its blind spots. In this episode, I hope to explain some of these limits by knowing them, helping you to avoid them. We will examine the way reason works and several of the ways that it doesn't. Specifically, I want to look at some of the ways that reasoning can go wrong or mislead us, because when we make a mistake, it's generally because we believe we are using good reasoning. Let's start by talking about how we reason or more accurately, and how it's supposed to work when it works correctly. Reason always moves from what we already know in the past, into the unknown. That is, what we don't know, but we want to know, which is the future. We start with assumptions about what we think we know, and we use those to make inferences about the way things are or will be, or even could be. That is, the world of the future. Even basic math takes the same form. You start with things that you know or you accept, like one and one. And then you make an inference to gain or project some sort of new information, like the idea of two. So we know we have one and one, and because we know we have one and one, we know that we have two. In fact, we would say it's impossible to have one in one and not to have two. Thinking of reason in this way allows us to see that these two spots are where we can screw things up. One of them is our initial assumptions, and the other is the inference itself from those assumptions, ultimately to our conclusion. And like the Greek proverb, there's many a slip between cup and lip here. No matter how careful we are, we tend to make mistakes. Have you ever eaten a food that you were just sure you're not going to like? And then, much to your great, great surprise, you ended up loving it. What made you so sure you weren't going to like it in the first place? In other words, how did your reason's predictive powers go so very wrong? For me, the food was mushrooms. I mean, intellectually, there's not much appealing about mushrooms. They're gray, they're slimy, they're lumpy. They smell kind of moldy, but Plus, just knowing that they're the reproductive organs of fungi makes the whole thing worse. But they're delicious. I love mushrooms, even though it took me a while until I was like maybe in my 20s, before I tried my first one. So, unfortunately, when things don't go as expected, it's rarely a pleasant experience. You know, as my discovering the delights of mushrooms were. More often we get disappointed, we get frustrated, or we could even get hurt, you know, both physically and emotionally. But critical thinking gives us tools to adjust and recover, to keep moving forward with a clearer sense of how to handle such situations of uncertainty. It doesn't matter. There doesn't eliminate the unknown, should I say. But it helps us to navigate it better and pick up ourselves up when we inevitably go wrong. So the goal here isn't perfection or having everything go right all the time. The goal is to be more prepared for the unexpected to reduce the number of surprises and keep our plans from getting completely derailed. That's how critical thinking helps us live better. It gives us fewer disruptions and therefore greater peace of mind. So let's talk about arguments for a second. Specifically, we need to know the difference between deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments. You may have heard these terms before, like, you know, in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but most of us don't really know what they mean. And if you look up dictionary definitions, you're probably not going to know much more. For example, Merriam-Webster online says the difference between deduction and induction is that deductive reasoning is making an inference based on widely accepted facts or premises. If a beverage is defined as drinkable through a straw, one could use deduction to determine soup to be a beverage. Inductive reasoning is making an inference based on an observation, often, of a sample, you can induce that the soup is tasty if you observe all of your friends consuming it. Does that help? Yeah, probably not, right? What they actually tell us is what is at stake in the argument? Some arguments aim to make very strong, in fact, undeniable claims. While others are a little softer, they are more about probability than they are about certainty. Typically, a really strong claim is more likely to be deductive. The more tentative claims are usually inductive or abductive. Being able to spot the difference in strength between these arguments is a skill, and it takes practice, but it could be really useful in analyzing arguments. So let me break this this down. A deductive argument is one where the conclusion has to follow from the premises. In other words, if things you know are true, then the conclusion must be true as well. You can ask yourself, if my assumptions here are true, does that guarantee the truth of the conclusion? If the answer is yes, then you're dealing with a deductive argument. Here's an example. It's sunny in Singapore. If it's sunny in Singapore, then Phil won't be carrying an umbrella. So, he won't be carrying an umbrella. It's pretty straightforward. If those first two statements are true, the conclusion logically follows. In fact, this argument is an example of what philosophers have called a modus ponens. It's the Latin phrase for this kind of argument. If P then Q, P, therefore Q. It's a little out of order in the example I gave you, but the logic is still the same. The logic here is sound. If those premises are true, then you cannot imagine the conclusion to be false. You might say, well, what if Phil just happens to be carrying an umbrella? Well, then one of those two premises must also have been false. And that's not a question of inference, but requires an entirely different kind of argument, where we put the premises into question. But here we're looking at the conclusion and its relationship to those premises. Now, in an inductive argument, the conclusion only probably follows from the premises. It's not guaranteed. So when you're looking at how much support the premises give to the conclusion without expecting 100% certainty, you're probably looking at an inductive argument. Some inductive arguments are strong, meaning that the conclusion here turns out to be it's more likely to be true. Others are weak, meaning the conclusion, you know, it might be true, but we're not really terribly sure about it. Here's an example of an inductive argument. I walked by this dog a hundred times. It has never once tried to bite me. So I assume that the next time I walk by it, it's not going to try to bite me. The premises here do give us good reason to believe that this conclusion is true, that the dog's not going to try and bite us, but it's not a sure thing. You know, maybe the dog's just been in a really good mood every day we've passed it, but today's the day that it plans on chomping down on us. You know, it's not impossible to imagine the dog turning on you, even though these premises are true. So that is what makes it a matter of probability, not a matter of certainty. Abductive arguments deal with generating hypotheses and, well, different; they work pretty similarly to inductive arguments. So I'm just going to set them aside for now, just to save time.. All right. So once you know what type of argument you're working with, whether it's deductive or inductive, the next step is figuring out whether that argument is valid or cogent. Let's start with validity. When we talk about a valid argument, we're saying that if the premises are true, then the conclusion has to be true as well. It's all about the form, then, of the argument, and not necessarily the actual truth of the premises. We're not looking for that right now. Recall our two gaps between what we know and what we want to know. Validity deals only with the inferential one, the second one. Do these premises actually relate to this conclusion? I'll take this classic example. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal. OK, let's analyze it. The words are like men and Socrates are what we call "terms". And terms don't have a truth value. It doesn't make sense to ask if men or Socrates is true or false. They're just labels. Now, when we put those terms into a sentence, like Socrates is a man, that's a statement. And statements do have true values. They could be true or false. Socrates is a man, or he's not. Those are the only options. But statements can be no more valid than the terms can be true or false. So when we're looking for validity, we're not actually looking at statements themselves, you know, that it's the statements in the way they relate to each other in the form of the argument. So arguments are either valid or invalid based on how they infer from the premises to the conclusion. In other words, how they connect one statement that's supposed to be convincing us that something is true with another statement that's supposed to be like what we're trying to prove, right? That's what we want to determine if it's true or not. So when we're analyzing an argument, we're not looking for the truth of the individual premises, not at this point. We can go back and do that at some other time, but we're just going to assume that they're true for a moment. We're checking whether the argument itself is valid. That is, we're looking at the logical connection between the premise and the conclusion. If these premises were true, then that is a big if. But if they were true, does the conclusion logically have to be true? If the answer is yeah, then the argument is valid. Now, here's an important point you need to keep in mind. Even if the premises aren't actually true, the argument can still be valid. Validity does not depend at all on the facts being added. That's the other gap, right? Validity depends simply on the form. For example, the argument, all tigers are pink. Captain America is a tiger. Therefore, Captain America is pink, is a valid argument, even though not a single one of those statements is true. The point is, is where the first two statements to be true, like if we assumed they were true, would that mean that the last one has to be? And the answer is, yeah, if those first two were true, that all tigers are pink and that Captain America is a tiger, then yes, Captain America would have to be pink. An invalid argument, on the other hand, might have true premises and yet still lead to a false conclusion. So, for example, to say all tigers are cats, that's true, Simba is a cat. That's true. Therefore, Simba is a tiger. Well, no, that's not right. Simba is a lion. This argument has all true premises, but ultimately a false conclusion. That is because its form is invalid. It does not follow from knowing that all tigers are cats and that Simba is a cat, that Simba is a tiger. Simba can be another type of cat. Okay, so the real truth here is that mentally healthy people generally do not make that many deductive, invalid arguments, right? Like the ones we were just talking about. It's far more likely that they're going to make a mistake that is in the thinking of an inductive argument. There are hosts of reasons for this, from the myriad informal fallacies that go along with these to perceptual errors, to cognitive biases, and many, many, many more. Generally, when we make a mistake, this is how it happens. I'll talk more about induction in future episodes. So suffice it for now to say that we induction is just trickier. The reason it's trickier is that there is a range of likelihood rather than a strict, you know, on or off kind of condition that we see with deduction. So there's a small infinity of space for errors. For now, I want to take a step back and look at some of the limitations to all the different kinds of reasoning, it would benefit us to know. We're going to look at five in particular. The first one is that reason always begins from an assumption. The strength of the argument, then, depends on the truth of these assumptions, and there's always some room for doubt here. This is, of course, the weak link and every kind of reasoning. It's the first gap that we were just speaking about back in the beginning of the episode. Every argument is only ever as accurate as its assumptions, and every argument must start with assumptions. In fact, when we try to make an argument without assumptions, we end up with what is known as circular reasoning. Right? What is circular about it is that you have assumed everything it is that you were trying to prove. I'm right because I'm right, is technically a valid argument, but it's not terribly compelling to us because we just assumed the premise, right? The thing that we wanted to prove in the first damned place is simply an assumption. The second problem with reasoning is that it doesn't always lead us to consensus, right? We like to think that if we were all reasoning correctly, we would all be led to the same conclusion. And that's simply not true. Even widely accepted conclusions could end up not being correct. Let's take an example here. Even if everyone agrees that the Earth is round, it can still be doubted. For example, take the evidence that we can see a ship coming up over the horizon, right? We're looking out over the ocean. The ship is coming up over the horizon. We see the flags at the top of the mast first. And then we see the sails and then we see the prow of the ship, right? And then we see the thing, the body of the ship comes up over the horizon, you know, one after another after another. This seems to suggest that the Earth itself is curved and that the ship was coming over that curve. But all the arguments include background assumptions, right? And we could call some of these background assumptions into question. In this case, for example, we're assuming that light travels in a straight line. If we argued that light travels in a curved line, instead, then it would appear on a flat earth that the ship was coming up over the horizon. So in this way, there's always a way if you think deeply enough to come up with an alternative theory, a different way of understanding things. And this is what leads us to a great deal of our political battles, you know, and ethical battles, things like that is someone can always think of it from a different point of view. And therefore, you can never prove that this is the right way to look at it. A third reason that reason doesn't do so well is that it takes time. Reason is slow. Swift decisions often bypass our careful reasoning. Human minds can be either reflective or reactive. The reactive mind is fast, emotion-based, and generally uncritical. The reflective mind is often more accurate, but it takes more time to reach its conclusions. Consider this conclusion. Solar power stops working at night. This seems reasonable enough. A solar-powered house must be without power at night because the panels don't generate electricity when there is no sun, and we know there is no sun at night. But upon reflection, we would realize that solar power generally includes batteries, which store power to produce energy that was made during the day for use at night. And this conclusion now seems a little less plausible. But if we're pressed for time, we might not be able to think about that, right? We might not consider all of the like other aspects that we were concluding. If we're rushing to judgment, it might sound very plausible to us that solar power just doesn't work at night. The fourth reason is that reasons is limited by our pre-established values. Our values shape how we reason, sometimes limiting our possible solutions. If you heard the expression "think outside the box", that exercise is useful if we take it as a call to expand our values, to gain new experiences, to take in diverse opinions. But if you believe you could just be more imaginative somehow, you can't. Your perceptions and understanding is limited to your experience. For example, if I said Imagine a triangle, you'd probably have no problems calling one to mind. But if I said, imagine a cha gone, you'd probably struggle, even if you knew what that was. cha is a thousand-sided polygon. You just don't have any experience with a concept like that, right? Does it look like a circle? Well, it's not a circle. It's a chilagon. It has exactly 1,000 sides. And so the concept is hard for us to imagine. That limitation, we can see in a bunch of other things as well, like reason creates a horizon of possibilities for us that we can't seem to see beyond because we can't think of things outside of our own experiences, knowledge, and understanding of things. Right. So if you have some certain false notions that you're carrying around with you, they're actually going to limit you in some pretty serious ways. If you're trying to be creative, for example, the first 100 things that you think of are going to be shaped entirely by the system of beliefs that are already established. And so if you really do want to get creative, you just have to keep banging away at it. You have to keep trying to gain new experiences. You have to keep trying to put two things together that weren't necessarily something you've ever seen put together before. And eventually, you start to get new and more creative ideas. A fifth problem with reason is that it fails to incorporate our emotions. Emotions often guide our reasoning, especially when it comes to moral decision-making. David Hume argued that what makes something right or wrong depends on our emotional response to it. For example, imagine you're walking down the street and you see a guy beating his dog. I mean, this guy's not just like slapping his dog a little bit. He's beating it hard. He's hitting it over and over again. The dog is whining. It's crying. It's desperate to be released, but he's got the dog on a leash and he keeps yanking it back so he can hit it and kick it again and again and again. He's beating his dog to death. It's disgusting to watch. It's making you feel sick to your stomach. You want to tell this person that they must stop. But for what reason can you tell them to stop? It's their dog. If they want to beat their dog to death, who are you to tell them that they're wrong? This is where our sense of morality comes from, according to Hume. I have this feeling of disgust inside me looking at what you're doing. Therefore, I think that that tells me I have the right to say what you're doing is wrong. This can lead to, of course, obvious problems. You know, if I don't like the way you dress, I can say what you're doing is wrong. If I don't like the way you smile, I can say what you're doing is wrong as long as it upsets me in any way. But this is the basis of morality. Most of us would agree that when a person beats a dog to death for nothing but their own enjoyment, that is wrong. Whereas, you know, maybe the way someone dresses or the way they smile is not something we would universally agree is wrong. It would be more subjective than that. But the point here for Hume is that emotion is what stands behind our moral decision making. It's what stands behind our reason. Reason doesn't come first in this case. It comes second. And so to ignore emotions or to fail to incorporate them into our reasoning is detrimental. And philosophy has a long history of neglecting the role that emotions play. So before we quit this subject, I want to mention two things that are making it harder for us to reason clearly in the digital age. And that is disinformation and echo chambers. Disinformation is is deliberate. It's false information spread on purpose in order to manipulate people. Often, it's used to trigger some emotional reaction, like fear or anger. The more we react emotionally, the less we tend to think critically. Fear literally short-circuits your brain so that you stop thinking. Remember, earlier I had said that there was a reactive and a reflective part of your mind, right? Once you go into an emotion like fear or anger, your brain automatically switches over to the reactive sense, right? You stop thinking critically because it's assumed you're in some kind of an emergency and you need to think quickly. And like we said, reason tends to take time. So if you want people to stop thinking too closely about something, a good way to do that is to stroke their fear. Social media algorithms thrive on this punchy, reactive, hardwiring in our brains. It feeds us what gets the biggest reaction, not necessarily what's true. I mean, politicians have understood this phenomenon for millennia, but social media technology has really exacerbated the problem of demagoguery. That is, when leaders try to gain prominence by exciting the passions and prejudices of their audience. But these same algorithms that promote myth and disinformation, because it's more provocative, also create what's known as echo chambers. This is because the same algorithms show us more of what we already tend to believe. Rather than challenging the beliefs that we have, we end up surrounded by voices that only agree with us, reinforcing our opinions, and making us think we have a consensus. But it's an illusion. Instead of challenging our beliefs, we get stuck in a loop of confirmation. And our ability to question and reason gets weaker and we weaker and weaker until it ultimately just fails. As a result, we're easily led astray. The truth will out, so that the ancients used to say. But when your reality is constructed for you by these algorithms, the truth never really arrives. The best way I can put this is the internet poses the possibility of creating an artificial reality. When you go to check what is true, what with reality and you check it on the internet, you're checking with an artificial reality. It's not really there. It's not really happening. You can create false walls that people can walk right through. And so it looks like people can walk through walls. But in the actual world, in actual reality, you can't. You can't do those things. And so this leads a lot of people to the problem of thinking that they have real reasoning and real solutions when, in fact, they do not. So how do we fight this? Well, you're going to have to get really uncomfortable. You're going to have to start by seeking out different perspectives, different viewpoints that ultimately challenge your beliefs. And when someone provokes a strong emotional reaction to you, it's time to stop, take a step back, and check in with yourself, right? You want to soberly review the facts by asking yourself, what if I'm wrong? What if they're wrong? What if some part of it is wrong? What if part of the background assumptions here are wrong? Neither disinformation nor echo chambers have much of an effect on our ability to reason rightly if we can stop and question ourselves and our sources of information. Remember, too, that the internet, social media, and all these information algorithms that we've come to rely on are absolutely brand new, and none of them are designed to detect truth. Instead, their programmed to catch what's shocking, what's entertaining, what's bizarre, why do they do that? Because that's what keeps us locked to our screens. They activate our sense of what wonder. Think about it. We're hardwired to pay attention to what is strange and new, what's unusual, what's out of place. So the weirder something is, the more attention we tend to pay to it. You combine this with the fact that social media companies make their money by selling your attention. And it's easy to see that they're going to promote anything outrageous, anything, whether it's true or not. The truth is often pretty mundane and that doesn't sell. Our natural sense of curiosity is at work here, but these algorithms know this too, and they use it to hook us in and keep us coming back for more. This isn't always lead us into trouble. Most of us can look at like a tabloid newspaper and see the headline with, you know, a seven-headed baby born to an elderly couple and just roll our eyes and move on. But the internet doesn't really stop there. It just messes with the way we usually check our ideas and test our beliefs against reality. The real issue with the internet, and here I mean the whole digital landscape, is that it builds this artificial sense of reality, where fantasy in fact don't really have a difference. So let me explain this through something of a pragm.matist lens. Charles Sanders purse said that we start to know the world by proposing ideas or concepts of what things might be. He calls this firstness, basically, anything our imagination can come up with. But then there's secondness, and that's where the world starts to push back. It's this friction between our ideas and the way reality actually behaves. Imagine thinking you could walk through walls. That's fine in the realm of firstness. But in secondness, once you go to try it, you're going to break your nose. Reality does not mold itself to fit our ideas. We have to adjust our ideas to fit it. Or as Sherlock Holmes has it in one of Doyle's books, it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to theories instead of theories to suit facts. Perse calls that final harmony between our concepts and reality, thirdness. And that's what we would call something like knowledge.. The problem with an internet-driven reality is that it hijacks and the pushback that we get generally from the real world in that form of secondness. On the internet, there is no concrete wall. There's no friction. There's no resistance to our wildest dreams and fantasies. So there's no clear line between what's real and what's imagined. The Internet is a virtual reality of information limited only by imagination. In firstness, pure and simple, and it's hard to say what the effect of all this is going to do to us in the long term. But for now, let's just say a cautious approach to internet wisdom, of which AI, by the way, is entirely constructive, would be the wise course of action. And remember, recent has its limits. While it's a powerful tool for understanding, it often fails to grasp the full complexity of reality. The internet, with all of its algorithms that favor the sensational all over the true, can exploit those cognitive biases, making it easy to mistake attention-grabbing content for reliable information. Reason takes time, fails to build consensus. It ignores our emotions, and it's limited by its reliance on pre-established values and assumptions. Awareness of these limitations reminds us to approach our beliefs with caution and question what we encounter, and that keeps us open to alternative perspectives. So as you go about your day, remember, when something feels certain, take a moment to test it, to question it. This is how you keep your mind fresh and flexible, and open to new angles and new ideas. This helps us avoid snap judgments and remain open to perspectives that challenge our own. You should get in the habit now, and then you reap the benefits of doing this going forward. Thanks for listening to me.Americ Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think might also love a little wisdom in their life. Next time on American Socrates, we'll take a more in-depth look at arguments, how they work, how they can help us understand reality, and also, how to know if you're giving a good one or not.