Reasoned Truths Flashcards
Reason does not lead us to the truth if only we obediently follow it. It is more like a navigation tool that can help us get closer to the truth. If we know how to use it, and what we are looking for.
Only by using reasoning can we discover our own cognitive flaws. It’s a smart creature that understands very well the nature of its own stupidity. And by understanding the traps of irrationality that we can fall into, we can become better at avoiding them.
Thomas Jefferson: expressed hope that United States had embarked on an experiment that “we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth”.
Rationalists - Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza - believe that reason is superior to observation because it can get behind mere appearances. Most philosophers have abandoned strict belief in rationalism, believing that it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
David Hume - all that pure reason can do is analyze the relationship between concepts, but this tells us nothing about the relationship between the things in the world that the concepts relate to.
(1 + 1 = 2 is a truth about numbers, but it says nothing about what happens when 2 physical things are put together)
The weakness of believing that the closer we bring reasoning and logic together, the more rigorous and robust our thinking will be, is that to make our arguments logical, we have to simplify them, stripping out the ambiguity, vagueness and complexity of real life, creating the illusion of clarity that disguises the truth that there are no adequate instructions for reasoning effectively about most real life problems.
Reason is not at its best when it is in its purest form - reason can be like alcohol, when it is too pure it can be toxic. Reason works best as a blend which includes not just logic but experience, evidence, judgment, subtlety of thought and sensitivity to ambiguity. Reason in its broader and most practical sense is essentially the capacity to make inferences on the basis of sound reasons. We make these inferences in many ways and deductive logic is not the main way.
Reason is an imperfect tool used by imperfect users. It can go wrong in two different ways.
