Limitations of Reason

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I wonder what members here think about the potential limits of reason. If reason is the tool by which we attempt to distinguish truth from illusion and acquire reliable knowledge, to what extent can it also examine the conditions that make reasoning possible in the first place?

Is it the case that what appears rational to us is inevitably shaped by the assumptions, experiences, and structures through which we encounter the world? And if so, does this leave open the possibility that reason may be unable to provide a completely independent foundation for knowledge?

As I understand it, Kant’s distinction between the world as it is given to us through experience and that which may lie beyond the limits of possible experience seems to suggest that reason has boundaries it cannot simply reason its way beyond. Metaphysical arguments attempting to prove a realm of higher consciousness or God, for instance.

Nietzsche, as a good iconoclast casts doubt on the possibility of a wholly objective standpoint, questioning whether our claims to rationality are ever entirely separable from our perspectives. Perhaps it’s the case that reason is not necessarily a path towards certainty, but a means of becoming more conscious of any boundaries, assumptions, and possibilities that condition what we take to be true.

It is, of course, a pillar of undergraduate philosophy that to use reason to cast doubt upon reason gives the game away through self-refutation. But this still doesn’t point to reason as an infallible foundation. What it does seem to point to is that we probably can’t step outside our practices of reasoning, language and justification to validate them from some supposedly neutral standpoint. There is no Archimedean point beyond the game from which to judge the game itself.

You can see how some thinkers take reason to be a metaphysical process in itself: an illumination, a transcendent rational order. In this view reason is not merely a human instrument for making sense, it participates in something more fundamental, perhaps “divine reason”, the Logos, or some kind of underlying rational structure of reality. Aquinas, for example, understands human reason as participating in the eternal reason of God.

Or is reason simply one tool among many, a way we’ve evolved to navigate the world, leaving us to some extent ‘imprisoned’ within the limits of our cognitive apparatus?

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There are different kinds of reason

We cannot reason effectively about our ultimate ends because they are contingent on emotional and motivational states which change.

However we have fairly effective (but not perfect) instrumental reasoning which tells us how to achieve ends

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Nice. This might be worth exploring later.

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What is man/woman/human, and how do you know it/this?

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My intuition continuously outperforms my logic. Reason often convinces me that everything adds up, only for me to realize too late that my initial gut feeling was right all along

Reasoning has clear blind spots in real-life scenarios. Logic often constructs a coherent picture that masks underlying issues, whereas intuition flags the anomaly immediately. By the time logical reasoning uncovers the truth, the damage is already done

I’m talking about my own experience. A lot of people have very bad intuition

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I stress the “if” here because I take later thinkers in the tradition to move beyond representationalism and its “mirror” metaphor. In “retrospect” ( from “outside” of this framework), the monotheistic heritage is obvious. We have both the monological (a search for “the” truth) and a body-alienated dualism. Part of this body-alienated dualism is an exaggeration of the primate mouth. It is “logocentric” to look for belief primarily in what primates say. The problem with logocentrism is that it is unrealistic in a non-metaphysical sense.

In my view, it becomes more obvious that “reason” can examine itself if we consider an organism adjusting its “policy” over time in the face of feedback from the environment. Embodied “reason” is something like the “specificity” of an organism’s visceral tendencies. Humans are especially “self-conscious.” As Brandom puts it, philosophy makes reason explicit to itself. We begin to reason about our reasoning, largely through coining new words that enable us to discuss discussion itself.

I’m glad you bring this up. To ingest Darwin is to worry perhaps that the brain is not a “truth device.” But then one might worry whether the theory of evolution — an output of this device — is “true.”

One might worry about how to “parse” the claim that “there is no Archimedean point beyond the game.” Is such a statement “true” ?

Everything becomes easier when we let go of the mirror metaphor and the mystified but vacuous sign “truth.”

As Gadamer puts it, we “are” prejudice. To be able to speak English is to have been trained like a money to respond this way rather than that way to a signifier. Prejudice enables. Prejudice hobbles.

Is a cat imprisoned within its claws ? I think you will agree that it is not. And yet the human animal has such an imagination that it can sometimes suffer its biological specificity as a prison. The human animal is so social-symbolic that it can identify more with time-binding signs than with its own dying flesh.

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Agrippa’s trilemma has no solution. Philosophers have resigned themselves to simply falling on one of the 3 horns. Very noble of them (us, assuming professional philosophers don’t mind us tagging along).

To add to our woes there’s this relatively new movement, logical nihilism which simply denies the existence of logical laws.

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I’d be interested to hear from logical nihilists. I often consider myself an existential nihilist. People often assume nihilism is a more dramatic account than it actually is. If logical nihilism simply questions whether logical laws have any objective, mind-independent existence or necessity, rather than rejecting logic itself as useless, then perhaps?

I’m not overly convinced by Plantinga’s argument re naturalism and truth, but it is a fun one.

Nice. A continuous improvement mechanism to use a business anology.

Yes. And I am keen to here what anti-foundationalist position might provide in this space. I have a sense of Rorty.

Interestingly, a lot of people would probably say this. I know I do. I wonder to what extent people decide using intuition and then retrofit the reasoning in a process that may be almost an unconscious reflex. Which brings us back to Nietzsche, I guess.

I find Wittgenstein mostly unreadable, but didn’t the later Wittgenstein move away from the idea that logic reflects some deeper structure of reality? He saw logic as bound up with how we use language and the rules governing different language games. Does this make logic contingent rather than sovereign?

This is intriguing, but I’m not sure I follow entirely. You ask about a cat’s claws? My cat can’t play with a balloon without its claws bursting it. So perhaps “imprison” isn’t quite the right word but his range is limited…

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:thinking:

There’s also linguistic nihilism :wink:

I’m ok with anyone being a nihilist but I know for certain that Christianity can’t tolerated nihilism/existentialism.

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I’d quesion this. There are many Christian existentialists.

But certainly nihilism is in opposition to most religion, which is, by definition, in the business of offering metanarratives of transcendence.

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Not the kind who believe there’s no God and that we’re masters of our own fate and destiny.

Transcendence is problematic but aren’t we all weary of the world in which we live?

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Nice OP, Tom!

For me the primary limitation is that reason is not what reason reasons about, except for the most simple understandings like the PNC and LEM, validity (meaning consistency) and so on.

I think what appears rational (I would rather say true) is inevitably determined by assumptions which are themselves not derived purely from reason, but from reasoning about actual experience, rationalizing beliefs that appeal and of course accepting what is considered by consensus to be established fact.

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Nice. Yes, this deserves to be unpacked further.

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I’ve become aware the last decade or so, the importance of the expression ‘the rational soul’ in ancient and medieval philosophy. This in turn is based on the understanding that reason is what separates humans from animals (they would have said ‘man from beast’ but that is nowadays considered non-PC.) In the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, reason is the faculty which permits us to grasp universal truths. Consider the following:

if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality ~ from Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.

Of course, all of this has been swept aside, not least by Kant, in his criticism of classical metaphysics. However, I’m also aware that there are Catholic intellectuals, notably one Fr Joseph Maréchal, who attempts to reconcile Thomas with Kant, in a school known as ‘transcendental Thomism’ (ref). But it is an arcane debate, and I’m still not sufficiently conversant with the details to even discuss it. But suffice to say, I find the basis stance of ‘Aristotelian-Thomist’ dualism, as given in the above quote, reasonably compelling. It preserves what I consider to be an essential insight of Platonism, albeit mediated through later generations of thinkers.

An old NY Times OP that I frequently cite in this context is by a columnist by the name of Stanley Fish, in a piece called Does Reason Know what it is Missing? This is based on the late great Jürgen Habermas’ dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger (before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI). These paragraphs capture the gist:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ he refers to is of course the subject of the well-known book of that name by Adorno and Horkheimer, another trenchant critique of ‘instrumentalised reason’.

Brace for another politically-incorrect argument here, but I think what’s missing from the modern conception of reason is any real ‘raison d’être’ for life itself. Absent God’s intentional creation, existence is customarily understood as being a kind of cosmic lottery, a chance event that happened because the right elements combined in the right way to give rise to this fantastically self-organising process that we then decode through evolutionary and molecular biology. But as this explicitly forbade teleology from the outset, it is conceived as being “purposeless” as a matter of definition. Hence these discussions, which I’ve been documenting, about the rediscovery of telos on the level of organic life. It’s a start, but it’s still a long way from the cosmic raison d’être that the religions provided.

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Yes, Rorty is a big influence. He gives the polite version, with one foot still inside the “seminary.” He is a little soft on the concept of “truth,” coming off vaguely as a “minimalist.” To me it makes sense to just go the whole hog.

Right. Early pragmatism was already pretty sophisticated. If we think of “signs” are one more tool in a tool using animal’s toolkit, then we think of success-versus-failure as opposed to true-versus-false.

A “demystified” Heidegger ( via Hobbes, for instance) is also helpful here. We shift from a spatial to a temporal metaphor. The real object is not hidden “behind” the apparent object. Instead we find ourselves counting on the future behavior of objects of that may surprise us. “Reality isn’t here yet.”

The primate “now” is a “steering” of the expected-oncoming “future” in terms of a remembered “past.” This is “all present now” in the “specificity of the reaching bloody hand.” The trajectory of a flying arrow “implies” both source and target.

We use “real” for what we can count on — and for what we can’t afford to ignore. The criterion for “truth” (“reality” ) is pragmatic. “Of course it is.” But the “spectator role-play” involves the pretense of a leaping out of and beyond the troubled flesh. This isn’t all pretense, though, because scientists and artists can temporarily, in their higher moments, speak as if “for the species.”

I was too obscure. I meant that human words are like the claws of a cat, or like horns or venomous fangs.

I should add that I think we do employ a “representational” effect via marks and noises. To me this is a generalization of the vervet monkey’s predator cry. We “cause” “quasi-perceptions” in others via noises and marks. The boy who cries “wolf” gives a “surrogate perception” to peers that may prove “false” in the sense of inappropriate or misleading.

In other words, the “picture theory” makes sense in the limited domain of these “quasi-perceptions.” So “true” and “false” are reasonable enough in ordinary life, at this level. But philosophers tend to extend “truth as correspondence” indefinitely. For instance, they think that physicalism is “true” or “false.” Without noticing, in my view, that they don’t know what they mean by “true” or “false” in this case.

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We all know some old-school materialists and folk philosophers who hold to this. I would say instead that agnosticism is a better approach. To say it is random or a lottery is clearly wrong, even by the standards of physicalists. Even the evolutionary biologists I have spoken to don’t peddle this frame, since random is inaccurate: there are laws of physics and other factors influencing evolution.

The same applies to the formation of galaxies and the broader development of the universe: these processes are constrained and shaped by physical laws, initial conditions and contingent events, rather than simply being random. That it isn’t or may not be guided by a thinking agent looks reasonable, but I don’t think that requires us to describe the process itself as random. And it isn’t a lottery unless we want to exaggerate the position and use a pejorative, poetic line to describe it.

Sure. I understand this is your position. I enjoy your contributions in this space even where I don’t agree. Somewhat glibly put, I appreciate the fact you read all this material so I don’t have to. :wink:

I could never quite work out Fish’s position. He is aligned with postmodernism and is an anti-foundationalist, and yet he is a Christian. He seems as absurd a figure as Terry Eagleton. Both of whom I enjoy reading. Perhaps I have a sneaking fondness for people who keep two sets of books.

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I beg to differ. I recently commented on an essay by Massimo Piggliuci, a well-known modern stoic philosopher, in particular this comment of his:

Ever since I was a teenager I thought that the issue of meaning had been settled: (i) there is no such thing as “cosmic” or universal meaning; but (ii) meaning at the personal, local level is a real and consequential human construct shaped by our biology and culture. I still believe both propositions, for the simple reason that they are the best explanation of all the facts we have come to know so far about the life, the universe, and everything.

… First of all, the scientific worldview holds that physical processes alone, operating through natural selection and other mechanisms, are sufficient to explain the emergence of all phenomena including consciousness and reason, without requiring any overarching purpose. Of course both Nagel and Goff object to this, but the reality is that the scientific worldview has been incredibly successful in practice, while the sort of metaphysics these authors keep pushing has done absolutely nothing to advance our understanding of the world and represents, in fact, a sliding back to the Middle Ages, if not earlier.

Second, and this is an elaboration of the point I have just made, teleological explanations simply fail to provide concrete mechanisms for how cosmic purpose would actually operate in physical reality. There is truly nothing there to be seen.

Third, non-teleological explanations are simpler and do not require additional metaphysical assumptions beyond established scientific principles, which means that teleological accounts violate Occam’s Razor. While the Razor is a heuristic, not a universal law of logic, it has, again, worked incredibly well so far, which means that we need to have very good reasons to start ignoring it. We have, at the moment, no such reason at all. …

And so on. I made a rather snarky comment on his essay (in Medium) and got a rather snarky reply (which prompted me to write my essay On Purpose, about the fact that biology has been forced to introduce the term ‘teleonomy’ in place of the discredited ‘teleology’.) But I regard the view he gives there as mainstream: if I were to devise a poll on it, my bet would be something like this view would attract the majority of votes.

(Oh, and I don’t know anything about Stanley Fish, other than that particular column.)

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Don’t you think that sells reason somewhat short? Evolutionary accounts of reason are the subject of Thomas Nagel’s essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, in which he argues that ascribing reason to evolutionary adaptation subjects it to an external tribunal. It makes reason subservient to ‘what works for the purposes of survival’ thereby undercutting its sovereignty.

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one’s psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one’s reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside–rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions ~ Thomas Nagel

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There’s also the triune lumen naturale (light of reason), lumen fidei (light of faith), lumen gratiae (light of grace). All 3 are good to go as far as they are good to go. Revelatory religions rely on the latter 2, philosophy on the first. There are cases of mathematicians who’ve claimed math was revealed to them e.g. Ramanujan (goddess Namagiri) and Cantor (\infty).

A few moons ago we had a thread on reliabilism. Did anyone participate in it?

Most philosophers like fallibilism - abandonment of certainty and corrigibility (receptivity to new evidence).

Someone mentioned intuition - to know without an explicit argument. Intuition is less reliable than rigorous logic, few can wield it proficiently.

All in all, I give logic 9/10

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A “cynic” inspired by Dawkins would stress sexual competition. Our species is relatively dominant. You really have to go out of your way to starve these days. People probably die more often from eating too much bad food. So it’s matter of winning mates, passing on DNA, largely through achieving status in various hierarchies. The “codes” fight it out among themselves with “meat puppets.” We can also look at battles between “memes” this way.

Autonomy is a hugely important norm. “Enlightenment” in the occidental sense is the assertion of just this autonomy.

I already addressed this, though. The “representational” framework that presupposes inquiry as “truth-finding” is indeed endangered by understanding humans as animals as human words as claws and teeth. “Post-truth” philosophy is even initially “hard to compute.” For one has been “trained” to “hear” every chain of signs as an attempt to expectorate pure “spectation.” We have the “seer” as the see-er.

Theory is etymologically “vision.” Inquiry is “pre-grasped” as a “holy seeing” and then the saying of a holy seeing.

If one is a “sobbing gristle pragmatist,” then “belief” is the “specificity” of primarily non-verbal conduct. The organism is navigating the “temporal depth” of its dangerous environment. Part of this navigation is anticipating what other human beings will do, given this or that event.

So we don’t generally have the luxury of detachment from our beliefs. Only weak and wavering beliefs offer themselves for careful consideration. Theoretical belief “floats” on an ocean of “blind gore” belief.

To me this is “reasonable enough” — given the Euclidean prejudice that dominates Western philosophy. I mean the “axiomatic” and “logocentric” prejudice that frets about making a “bulletproof case.” The goal is a “system of words,” a “proof” of God or immortality or freedom or the eventual arrival of Utopia, etc. “Rationality” is a game for the floating head. So we get mathematical platonism, for instance, as a kingdom of “pure truth-making essence crystal.” We get an “atemporal essence computer” in every “pineal gland.” The “bifurcation” of the subject mirrors a bifurcation in that subject’s world. The sign itself is bisected and understood as a “material vessel” for an “immaterial meaning-stuff.”

This is common despite a temporal rather than spatial interpretation that avoids a bifurcation of the world and —more importantly — untangles rather than celebrates the confusion. But it’s in the interest of philosophy as armchair science of essences to not think about this aspect of thinking.