Rational Philosophy

What is reason?

I’ve probably written about fifty posts already on this blog, but it occurred to me just yesterday that I have yet to write about “reason.” Since the name of the blog is rationalphilosophy.net and since it’s my stated goal to analyze subjects of interest from a rational perspective, I think I should correct the omission.

We can encapsulate the realm of reason as follows: Reason involves the logical manipulation of abstract concepts.

To unpack this: “Reason” itself is an abstract concept that describes a mental process. This mental process is what happens when we use logic to explore and analyze other abstract concepts. “Logic” is the consistent application of definitive rules (it’s also an abstract concept).

So, when we take any set of defined rules and apply them consistently to analyze ideas, we are using reason.

Notice, we’ve said nothing about whether the rules reflect reality. Neither have we said anything about whether the ideas being analyzed reflect reality. Reason doesn’t require real objects. But as we evolved the rational faculty we first apprehended reason through our interaction with the real world, because that’s our primary and immediate point of reference. The real world also provides us with myriad situations that can be abstracted and anaylzed through reason. Reason is what we do to some extent and with varying degress of success day in day out just to stay alive.

When I was a boy I used to enjoy logic puzzles. Many of them conjured up odd worlds populated by fanciful tribes (one springs to mind about three different groups that sometimes, always or never told the truth). After setting out the rules of the imaginary world and posing a problem, the puzzles left the puzzler to figure out a rational solution. The unspoken dictat being that if the puzzler applied logic, he would find a definite solution.

In real life, we often find ourselves presented with problems or challenges for which no definite solution exists. Either the set of concepts is incomplete or the rule set to be applied isn’t definitive.

Here are some examples from current news stories:

Credit available to US business apparently shrank by an unprecedented 9% since August, perhaps pressaging a recession. The story and the information set reveal that it is impossible to deduce rationally whether the credit shrink indicates that a recession is nigh. The history that connects previous credit shrinks to recessions hasn’t established a definitive causal link, the circumstances surrounding the current credit shrink are unique, and the actions that people and institutions will take in response to the credit shrink are undetermined. But rationally we can say that we have cause to be concerned about a recession given the news about a credit shrink.

After the latest round of middle-east peace talks ended with a commitment from both sides to work toward peace in ‘08 and a two state status quo, Ehud Olmert is quoted as saying: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” Olmert asserts this as rational fact, but he is inferring a future event by comparison to a similar set of circumstances. He is probably correct to draw the comparison, and he may be making a reasonable guess about the outcome, but the categorical tenor of his statement leans on emotion rather than logic.

Bill Clinton this week said that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. Records of his statements at the time indicate that he spoke in favor of completing WMD inspections rather than rushing to war. Clinton recalls that he didn’t speak out more plainly because it would have been inappropriate for a former president to question the military decisions of an acting president. Clinton could be recalling correctly and his statement may be true. Or he may be deliberately mistating his former position on the war in which case his statement would be false. But he may also be mistaken in his recollection, in which case his statement would be false in fact, but true in its own internal logic (derived from his faulty recollection). We cannot know which is the case unless Clinton kept some kind of definitive record of his true position on the war at the time.

The elusiveness of definitive information and fully understood conditions means that when it comes to real life we’re often working with approximations and likelihoods. We don’t know that something will happen (like a recession) but we try to deduce the likelihood and weigh the risks or benefits of certain actions in the face of this likelihood. This, I believe, leads to a very common mistake. When we’re faced with incomplete information, we often replace questions of “what is likely” with “what is possible.”

A striking example of this is religious belief. Religious belief is a matter of faith. We don’t have enough information to draw a rational conclusion about whether a god or supreme being exists or doesn’t exist. When many people argue about religion, they invert this logic to say that we don’t have enough information to draw the rational conclusion that a god or supreme being doesn’t exist. That’s true, but just because the two statements are true doesn’t mean that they infer the same likelihood of god’s existence.

Let’s put it this way: If I claim that a large frog lives on the far side of the moon, you cannot prove that I am wrong, but you can demonstrate with a very high degree of likelihood that I am wrong. I can also say that can’t prove that the frog doesn’t exist, and while this is true, I can’t demonstrate it with the same high degree of likelihood.

After a simple review of the world’s greatest conflicts we quickly determine that they are not caused by insolubly complex problems but by the refusal of people to engage in thoughtful, rational debate and problem-solving.

The NY Times reported yesterday that tighter controls for returning Americans at the Mexican border have been causing long delays, with wait times up to a couple of hours or more. I guess I’d never thought about how long it takes, nor how long it should take, to cross the Mexican border. I wonder now whether two hours is, in real terms, a long time. I also wonder how we deal with such numbers — the processing of numbers and the comparison of these abstract quantifiers affects so much of our lives.

Two other reports on numbers caught my eye:

“How many site hits? Depends who’s counting” discusses the fight between Internet businesses, ratings organizations, and advertizers, on how to count and account for website traffic. The businesses count more visitors than the ratings organizations. But which numbers are correct, and why do the advertizers care?

And in his piece on military contracting corruption (I won’t say scandal, because, unfortunately, it’s not that much of a scandal) Frank Rich points out that the suicide of the second highest ranking USAF procurement officer, seems to have been due to a sum of money that wouldn’t have even made a bulge in Erik Prince’s pants pocket (Erik is the Blackwater guy…)

Are such numbers real or abstract, relative or absolute? When we place stock in numbers, run our lives and our deaths by them, are we working with the stuff of tangible experience or throwing psychological dice?

Numbers start out real, I think, but quickly become signifiers. We seem to be very good at translating numbers into abstract concepts that we can use as points of data in processing everyday life, making decisions, discussing our opinions for and against, etc.

In the case of the Mexican border crossing: The numbers have a reality for someone who last year crossed the border several times without any wait time, and now has to sit in his car for two hours. The delay is real, tangible, perhaps it causes him to be late for an important event, or to lose income, or to become frustrated or tired or angry. But by the time the NY Times reports that average delays are up to a couple of hours, the number has become a signifier of stricter controls. If the delay time had gone up to two hours because of reductions in staffing it would have become a different signifier. If raccoon migrations had caused the delays, still another.

Similarly, website traffic numbers have a tangible basis in the collective urge of Internet users to visit pages on a particular site. I may feel an urge to go back to a site, to tell a friend about it, to click through from another page. These are tangible connections I have with my visits. Likewise other visitors have their tangible connections, too. If I were in a room with a group of people and half of us had visited a particular site and began to discuss it, this would be a tangible reflection of the aggregated numbers. But by the time the business and the ratings agencies are arguing about hundreds of thousands of clicks, the numbers have taken on a different meaning. They are now signifiers for reliability of data, viability of business models, money.

And lastly, in the matter of the poor man who killed himself over $26,788, this number was tangible to him, this was money that tided him over until he got his first Pentagon check. Maybe it meant that he and his family could avoid a few weeks of belt-tightening while he was between jobs. And then it became a signifier for him of a personal lapse in judgment. A signifier that he couldn’t downplay or get past. And now it has become another signifier for the sad schism between his devastated reaction to the publicity, and the administration’s generally flagrant waste and squandering and lining of the pockets of the likes of Erik Prince, Halliburton, and countless others.

In the modern world, a lot of counting goes on. We count things all the time. Everywhere, there are people counting things, arriving at statistics and conclusions, tranferring numbers into signifiers. The danger is that we begin to replace reality with signifiers. That the signifiers become more real to us than the reality that they attempt to signify. Life is in the here and now. If it’s not tangible, how much time should we spend consorting with it?

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