One of the more interesting things to come out of recent cognitive psychology research is that the way human beings use reason and logic is much different from how we originally believed it was. When people believe they are making a decision using reason, cognitive science has shown that they have quite often already have decided what they were going to do using other brain functions, and are simply using reason to justify this decision. Obviously, this makes sense to anyone who has ever wondered why mathematical proofs work the way they do, or how the scientific method could be applied if you didn't already use non-rational thinking beforehand to come up with the experiment you wanted to perform.
I think this is important, not just as a peek under the hood into how the brain works, but as an opportunity to recognize the limits of logic and reason in order to better evaluate how we use these tools. And I don't mean in the postmodern deconstructive "everything has biases" sense, but rather as a way to take the limits of reason into account so we can understand when the tool is, and is not, appropriate and stop leading ourselves into contradictory circles.
Reason's tainted past
The first thing that I believe people need to understand about logic and reason is that it was not developed as a way to seek higher knowledge. Reason was developed as a way for primitive man to win arguments. One person in the group thinks they are being stalked by wild bears. Another one doesn't think they are bears, and backs this up by pointing out that they are in Northern Africa and bears don't live here. Person #2 wins the argument—at least until they are both eaten by lost and confused bears who managed to swim the Mediterranean and are now very, very hungry.
This little story is there to illustrate a few points:
1) Any chain of reason is inherently biased in favor of the person making the argument (so reason is not this inherently impartial participant in the debate).
2) The person who is using reason is unable to see the holes in their logic without someone else there to make counter arguments. I know all of of those fans of the dialectic are saying "yeah, but the truth can still be found", and I will explain why they aren't completely right, so bear with me.
3) In order for humans to use reason, there generally has to be an argument in the first place. This may not seem important at first glance, since human beings generally have enough differences of opinion that reason will kick in at some point in most endeavors, but the problem is that there are times when we should be employing reason to check up on things, but we don't do so because everyone in the group already assumes that something is true. So reason is not, in fact, consistently applied to human knowledge due to inherent problems in the way that humans employ reason.
4) Reason (and especially logic) is only good at demonstrating an argument is internally consistent. It should not be used as a substitute for empirical data. This substitution is still made on a regular basis because the human brain still assumes that you are trying to win an argument and not that you are trying to reach for the actual truth.
This can often be seen in political or social debates over things like global warming, the theory of evolution, vaccines causing horrible disease, etc., where one person is continually trying to deliver a rhetorical ninja kick and then believes that because they just made a "reasonable" point that somehow the entire apparatus they are attacking should then collapse into a pile of dust. What they don't want to understand is that a lot of these theories have been hit by sledgehammers and wrecking balls of reason for decades (if not centuries) by minds as sharp as theirs, and yet they still stand. This is because they are supported by fact.
5) Reasonable arguments are not always the emotionally satisfying ones which means that, right or wrong, they are often ignored unless they are augmented by something that is emotionally satisfying. People in public policy understand this intuitively about large issues. A picture of a starving child in Africa, coupled with statistics about how there are thousands of others like her, is always worth more than the sum total of either the picture or the facts separately.
But this is true even with more mundane issues. Time and again, I have solved a math problem or a computer problem and even though I know I have applied the rules so that the answer should be correct by all standards of reason, my mind will not be convinced unless I go back and demonstrate the solution by plugging the answer in, or by running the computer program to make sure it works. While this is prudent, because there are times when I miss something, the bottom line is that your brain itself doesn't trust reason to always come up with the correct answer. There are also many cases where you stop reasoning about a problem, even when you should continue, because you are emotionally satisfied that you have the answer and aren't able to continue to reason without difficulty.
6) All systems of logic are based on certain assumptions (called axioms) that you must assume are true in order to use the system. These axioms can not all be verified to be true using the system itself, or the system would be either incomplete, or inconsistent (see "Gödel's incompleteness theorems" and "Liar's Paradox" for more details). This isn't really important in terms of cognitive limits to reason, or in fact to most everyday uses of logic, but rather it is a way of demonstrating that logic itself can prove that there are things that logic can't prove or disprove. This is not to reject logic as a tool of understanding the world, but rather to recognize that there are questions (both sensible and non-sensible) that you can conceive of which do not have an answer. All of this could partly be an example of 4) logic is no substitute for data, but I also believe that this limit shows why humans don't depend upon logic to make all of their decisions: it takes too long and the result can't be guaranteed to demonstrate a viable solution at the end of it.
At this point, the obvious question is Where is he going with all this?
Well, to begin with, I am not saying that we've reached the "death of reason", but I am saying that, especially in the realms of politics and philosophy, we need to reexamine what we think we are doing when we make decisions based on reason. Reasonable discussion can not, and never will, be guaranteed to come up with either an abstract truth or a usable way forward. There are times when it will fail. This is because argument is always made by human beings and human beings, at their core, are not rational creatures. Rather, they come into an argument knowing the "answer" and then use a chain of reason to support this. Even if one side manages to kick the chain of reason out from under the other side, this does not prove that either side is right (or even that one side is closer to the truth than the other), it just shows that one side is better at making an argument. So in the ideal universe of reason, you can probably make the claim to finding some sort of truth using the dialectic, but until we reach a point where reason can be used without the reasoners bringing in their own bias, we can not find this truth solely using reason and argument.
One upshot of all of this is the realization that you can not, in fact, convince most of your opponents in an argument using reason alone. This is because they are not making their argument from a position of reason (and neither are you). Which means that, no matter how hard you kick at their support, in the end it is the emotional part of their brain that decides when to give up. This is why debating on the internet for reasons other than personal enjoyment or enlightenment is a completely wasted effort.
Please note, I am not making an attack on Scientific or Mathematical truths here. These areas of human inquiry have developed a system to counterbalance these biases that, while not perfect, works well enough. But Science and Mathematics also assume a level of doubt that is not going to be applicable to Politics or Ethics. You can't be expected to make workable political decisions using the political science equivalent of a double blind study since 1) you don't have the resources to do this on a large scale, and 2) the timescale of decision-making prevents you from taking the time you would need to guarantee certainty. Ethics has these same problems as it works with a human timescale and is forced into justifying a decision without having all of the data you would need to gain absolute certainty.
The bottom line is that I am not making an argument in support of "shoot from the hip" kind of decision-making. I am not saying we should be doing it this way, I am merely pointing out that most decisions are already made this way, even though the people involved in the decision may believe otherwise. And the only way to combat this is to recognize that we don't know everything we think we know. We are always assuming things that back up our point of view, even when we think we are not, and that impeccable logic will not give us the emotionally satisfying result that we need in order to move forward with a decision.
