Reason, Logic and Rationality: What in the world do they mean?
Broadly and expansively (Largo)
One would have thought that of all the words in the English language, the words thinking, logical, reason and rationality would have pretty clear meanings. One would have thought so, that is.
I had originally planned to delve into thinking and knowing in this post, and even had a first sketch of the basic ideas, but I made the mistake of double-checking some of the basic definitions of the key words that kept cropping up, and ran into some problems.
Microsoft Word (Encarta) has these definitions:
Reason: (as a noun): an explanation or justification for something; a motive or cause for acting or thinking in a particular way; the power of being able to think in a logical and rational manner; a cause that explains a particular phenomenon; the ability to think clearly and coherently; the ability to think logically regarded as a basis for knowledge, as distinct from experience or emotions.
(as a verb): to think logically or use rational faculties; to try to persuade or influence somebody by means of rational argument; to formulate or resolve something using rational means
Rational: governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment, based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice; able to think clearly and sensibly, because the mind is not impaired by physical or mental condition, violent emotion, or prejudice; presented or understandable in terms that accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge and are not based on appeals to emotion or, prejudice; endowed with the ability to reason, as opposed to being governed solely by instinct and appetite.
Logical: based on facts, clear rational thought, and sensible reasoning; able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion; relating to philosophical logic.
Think:
to use the mind to consider ideas and make judgments
to believe something or have something as an opinion
to imagine or understand something or the possibility of something
to bring something to mind
to focus the attention on something
to regard somebody with care or concern
to regard somebody or something in a specified way
to have something as a plan
to anticipate something happening
to be attentive or considerate enough to do something
to make a mental choice
to bring something to a particular condition using the mind
Thinking (as an adjective—as in a thinking animal): capable of using the mind to reason or reflect.
How “rational” is all this?
If reason is being able to “think logically and rationally” (as distinct from experience and emotions), and if logical is “based on facts, clear rational thought, and sensible reasoning,” or “able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion,” and rational is “governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice,” and “endowed with the ability to reason, as opposed to being governed solely by instinct and appetite,” how do these all fit together?
We can see from the definitions that reason involves logic and rationality; logical involves facts, rational thought, and sensible reasoning; and rational involves ‘clear and sensible thinking’ that is based on reason rather than emotion, and that is in ‘accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge’. Is there a place we can start and follow around in a “logical” way so that everything falls into place?
This is how it looks, sketched out, with the arrows indicating which words are defined in terms of the other words:
reason ó rational
ô øõ÷ö ñ
logical ï thinking
Out of the twelve possible interactions that there would be if each of these four words were defined in terms of the other three, ten are present. This is more than “circular”: this is a veritable labyrinth, perhaps not unlike a painting by Escher, and so as to the question as to whether we might be able to have these particular definitions fall into place in a clear and orderly way, the answer appears to be “No”.
Some proposed definitions
I propose the following definitions to “straighten” that chart out:
reason:
Our generalized capacity to critically examine things or conditions with the intent of learning something, rather than to just take them as they are or at face value (including the meanings of words), or to just let things take their course without questioning them;
logical
One of the major criteria for good thinking, relating specifically to the sequencing and the ordering of components of analysis, events or conclusions such that subsequent steps or events flow from the antecedent steps in demonstrably or arguably understandable and or effective ways (in other words, that they are necessary and get the job done, whatever the job is); and
rational
A predicate not for what we are, as an essence, but what we are capable of and sometimes are, to greater or lesser degrees. It could be more specifically defined as a propensity to set aside our impatience to just get on with things, our reticence (for whatever reasons, including because we may be unsure of ourselves) to take the time and effort to figure out the smart thing to do, all (relevant) things considered, and whether to do it, and putting aside in particular our preference for quick or easy answers, or answers or decisions that we ourselves prefer, or the ones we have a personal stake in, and carry out the good thinking and analysis that it takes to make or come to a reasoned decision or a conclusion.
Being rational might also include knowing when and how “rational” to be, or how to be rational in an irrational world.
In this proposed breviary, thinking is the key active component, and can be considered to be one of the specific mental actions or processes that we take in exercising our capacity to reason, and which, if we do so at least occasionally and effectively, might allow us to claim that we have earned the right to use the predicate rational about ourselves.
Reason here, then, is the capacity, thinking is the means, logical is one of the criteria, and rational is a valid descriptor that we can apply to ourselves if we use our capacity to reason at all frequently and well.
Now the diagram looks like this:
Reason
ò
Thinking ð Rational
ñ
Logical
Thinking
Since thinking is the key component of our capacity to reason, or to use reason, I would like to explore it in more depth.
Good thinking, at its basis, requires having at least an interest, if not a passion, for the truth, which leads to taking care with words and meanings, and having respect for those who you are trying to convince about something.
Element 1: Taking care in the words that you use and how you use them. (definitions)
Element 2: Taking care in the clarity and consistency of the meanings (of the statements) that you are invoking or imputing, (meanings)
Element 3: Taking care in how you construct your sentences and paragraphs and review how those fit together to relate a clear, coherent and plausible representation of what you are thinking (how the elements fit, or “work”, together, with the linkages established). (how it all works).
Element 4: Taking care to remove or neutralize your ego-involvement, your possible narcissism and personal biases, and any residues of magical thinking that you may still have. [I (ego) removed]
Element 5: Good analysis. Examination of the origins and nature of the subject at hand, the dynamics and mechanisms involved in how it is manifested (how the components work together, and under what impetuses), assessing the contexts in which it applies or appears, the variation in the ways that it is manifested and the causes of the variation, what happens when initial conditions or new inputs change, and how susceptible it is to those changes, who or what groups of people are affected, what happens if a planned change or changes is/are introduced (including negative consequences), what happens if no change is introduced, what would be involved in introducing changes, the facility of making the change(s), and the costs, the benefits, the side effects, the expected longevity of the results, etc. (analysis)
Element 6: Consider other points of view, ideas, or theories on the subject. (other views)
Element 7: Give consideration not only to evidence for what you are proposing, but also, and more particularly, evidence against what you are proposing. (evidence for and against)
We don’t have the basics of good thinking about ideas and concepts, in particular (though the general ideas can also apply and be helpful in other areas of human activity), and we can’t really begin to call ourselves rational, until we know and practice these elements (a mnemonic device I use is that we haven’t done good thinking until the reasoning cat, or the philosophical cat, has miaowed; I apologize for this, but it helps.)
Beyond that, there are a number of other sophisticated techniques of good thinking (counterfactuals and other thought experiments, for example) that come in handy.
Some Missteps
I can’t help but feel that we may not have been very “rational” in our use of the word rational, and in particular that we have been using it as an adjective for what we do, rather than as a predicate for what we are like. Possibly because there really has been no clear definition of it, but one that has been embedded in overlapping definitions with other, related, words, with a good deal of circularity, it has in common parlance unfortunately been hollowed out to signify almost any decision-making criterion or criteria that can be generally applied.
“It’s the rational thing to do” is often heard. As a consequence, what many people now seem to mean by rational has more to do with being pragmatic or practical, and which, in the “push” of life, or in a competitive business (or other) market, often reduces to being operationally expedient, with an emphasis on efficiency and cost reduction. It may be “smart”, and it may warrant the label rational if good thinking has gone into it, but my experience tells me that in most cases this has not really happened, and that, to the contrary, in many cases decisions go against what good thinking suggests as the thing to do; where that often shows up is that a decision may (appear to) have good immediate results but long-term negative ones.
The question for us as putatively “rational” beings would seem to be how much of this irrationality should be accepted as the best that can be done in a generally irrational (that is to say, unthinking) world. Or do we value our capacity to reason and our abilities to think enough to keep holding these out as the standards that we should generally try to aspire to?
Emotions, Rationality, and the Human Condition
Going back to the Encarta definitions that I started this essay with, we can see phrases like:
(for reason) “the ability to think logically regarded as a basis for knowledge, as distinct from experience or emotions”);
(for rationality) “governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment, based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice,” and “presented or understandable in terms that accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge and are not based on appeals to emotion or, prejudice”);
(for logical) “able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion”
As someone who values the positive content of the Confucian idea of “human-heartedness”, or jen (sometimes written as ren), it also seems to me that in these standard definitions, there may have been an overly strong reaction to the deleterious effects that our emotions can have on our capacity to reason and to think critically. To invoke an old saying, we may, however, have “thrown the baby out with the bath water.”
Emotions can indeed “throw off” our critical thinking, but because our emotions are an integral part of what it means to be human, I feel that to not include our positive emotions in our thinking at all, to exclude even consideration of them, is to in effect de-humanize ourselves.
Positive emotions
One of the big problems in the definitions that we started with, you may have noticed, is that although they do not explicitly say so, what they would appear to be referring to are negative emotions; a second problem is that they do not identify the specific negative emotions that they may be referring to.
Let’s try to shed some light on these problems. In the first place, let us by no means leave out the positive passion for truth, which I would say qualifies as an emotion. Impartiality may not be an emotion, but I suspect that a commitment to it might be. And it may not be a bad idea to retain at least a controlled enthusiasm, which may or may not be related to the passion for truth; without enthusiasm, we just might falter in carrying out the good thinking that (as I have maintained here) is the hallmark of being rational.
Jen
The above paragraphs had to do with the positive role that positive emotions may play in good thinking, in the form of the states of mind of the analysts and others involved in decision-making.
However, there is yet another aspect that appears to be often left out of analyses and reasoning, and that is one that is encapsulated, for me, by jen, or “human-heartedness”. If we are doing the good thinking that needs to be done about decisions that affect real human beings, and this good thinking needs to include being aware of the human context or contexts that are involved, the question is how could an analyst adequately “know”, much less understand, these things unless he or she were looking at them with a “human heart”?
(It may also be instructive or illustrative to go back to the Encarta definition of think and see that one of the definitions is “to regard somebody with care or concern,” and another is “to be attentive or considerate enough to do something”. It appears that there already are some elements of “human-heartedness” in our common uses of the word think.)
“Rational” decision-making and Utility
In this context, I believe that it needs to be recognized that the invocation of “principles” or value- or positive emotion-free (or jen-free) decision criteria may be one of the principal means by which those of us who have no particular interest in other human beings as human beings, but see them primarily as means to their own personal ends, can do so in the name of being “rational”, and leave it at that.
A good example of this is how the British Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good of the greatest number” failed. What that principle failed to take into consideration was that there are minimum conditions that have to be met for an infant to become a human being, and also minimum emotional bonds for a community to be a functioning community; a human principle would seem to require that a priority first be given to ensuring that those minimum conditions are met, and then (and only then) maximizing the “greatest good for the greatest number.”
The utilitarian principle seems to have been, in effect, more of a calculus of disinterest than anything else. Indifference may not be an emotion (more like an absence of emotion), but it is definitely not a positive emotion, and can, in appearing to legitimize a decision that has harmful consequences, allow harm to be done with no remorse or regret. In any case, it is not in a variant, much less an acceptable variant, of impartiality.
Empathy, on the other hand, would appear to be a positive aspect of jen. Though it may not be an emotion as such, it is nevertheless necessary to gain a good understanding of the human contexts of decisions, and should not on principle be excluded from our good thinking. (We generally tend to think of sympathy as the emotion that may or may not be associated with empathy, and it can probably have both positive and negative influences on decision-making, and so great care needs to be taken in invoking it, to be sure that it is indeed a factor that should be included.)
Even though any one value- or jen-free decision criterion may not make much of an impact, taking all such decisions together, they can have a great impact on the quality of life of many humans.
It might be argued by some that considerations like these are exactly the kinds of considerations that good “rational” decision-making needs to exclude. However, the principled use of “human” value-free principles or decision-criteria also fails on a epistemological basis.
These kinds of principles and decision criteria are first (and only) human creations, and therefore are as mortally contingent as (almost) everything else that we conceive or do or make (the pyramids may be an exception), and it is a fatal epistemological error to subordinate ourselves to them in treating them as absolutes or “received truths.” Using them as guides is one thing, but to subordinate ourselves to them is quite another; even the United States Constitution had to be quickly amended to include the factors discussed here, and has of course been amended a number of times since.
To subordinate ourselves to abstract principles of our own creation without further thought would be approximately the equivalent of our creating an artificially intelligent robot and then worshipping it as our God. By now, we should be far too aware of the problematics of the human mind to come to the conclusion that any abstract principle is The Truth; to do so can only be the result of bad or incomplete thinking, and therefore irrational.
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As I mentioned at the outset, I had also wanted to discuss the idea of knowing, or what we know and how we know it, but this was sidetracked by my discovery of the tangle of definitions surrounding some of the other key terms. I encourage you, however, to visit the website shown below, as I found it to contain a good, concise overview of knowledge and knowing.
I encourage you in particular, in case you are not already familiar with it, to read and think about the differences between “knowing” and “understanding”. “Knowing” seems to tend to be more about individual facts or pieces of information that are either used in particular situations or recited on social occasions, but “understanding” has much broader, fuller, and dynamic connotations that imply an ability to do something on the basis of the understanding. “Knowing” yourself or someone else is in my view actually more like “understanding.”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14554355/Knowledge-Types-Revised - document_activity
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