Reason – The Business of Philosophy

“To say that a stone falls to Earth because it is obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen.”  -C. S. Lewis

People who believe in science as a worldview rather than a method of inquiry – I call them scientismists – are fascinated by science because they cannot grasp it, just like all people who are not magicians are fascinated by magic. What little understanding they do have of it, in principle, is superficial. The difference between people’s perception of science and that of magic is that magic can always be explained. Magic plays a trick on one’s perception. That is magic’s nature as well as its goal. Science, on the other hand, cannot always be figured out. There simply is not a scientific explanation for everything (or of most things). Nor is it science’s goal to explain everything! Science is an incremental process of collecting empirical data, interpreting it, and attempting to manipulate aspects of the environment accordingly for (mostly) human benefit. It is experimental and observable. It is, as I will explain, inductive. Unfortunately, sometimes unknowingly, human subjectivity intervenes in at least one of these three steps, exposing its limits through ours. So, where does reason fit in to this process?

What “Reason” is NOT

One problem with scientism is that it equates science and reason. This is incorrect. Although philosophers of science, most of whom are scientists themselves, have debated the definition of science since it was called ‘Natural Philosophy’, there is one thing that we do know about it and the difference between it and reason. Science deals with questions of ‘how’. It describes the inner-workings, the technicalities, of observable processes and states of affairs. Reason deals with questions of ‘why’. It explores lines of thinking – fundamental goals, purposes, and meanings – for those processes and states of affairs as well those for many other non-scientific processes and states of affairs. Having said that, reason is necessary for science, but it is immeasurably more broad.

Science cannot alone answer why-questions. Claiming that it can is a mark of scientism. Why is that?

I will now give reasons for that by using an example from Dr. Wes Cecil’s 2014 lecture about scientism at Peninsula College:

Engineering, which is a type of science that has its foundations in calculus, can tell us how to build a bridge. Engineering can build the biggest, longest, strongest bridge one could possibly imagine. How will the bridge look? We marry science and art to make the bridge beautiful as well as functional. So, even at this first stage of building a bridge – design – science cannot stand independent from even art, which seems so much more abstract.

Furthermore, why do we need to build a bridge? This is a question of reason, not of science. The answer seems to be “to get to the other side of the river”. But what the engineer (who is also a business man who wants to land the deal for this highly-lucrative project) might neglect is that building a bridge is not the only way to get to the other side of the river. Perhaps a ferry would be an easier, more cost-effective option. The engineer can tell us how to build a ferry too, but making the decision between the bridge and the ferry, ultimately, is not the engineer’s business.

Even once the decision has been made to build the bridge, several more questions arise: who will pay for the bridge?; how will they pay for it?; where exactly will the bridge be?; who will be allowed to use the bridge? Motorized vehicles only? Bikes? Pedestrians?; etc. These are not scientific questions, and nor are most questions in our everyday lives. They are economic, ethical, and political questions that, much like the scientific question of how to build the bridge, require some application of reason, but they cannot themselves be equated with reason. Reason is something as different as it is important to these goals, processes, and states of affairs.

What is Reason?

Reason is a skill and a tool. It is the byproduct of logic. Logic is a subfield of philosophy that deals with reasoning in its purest forms. So, if someone wants to believe that science and reason are the same thing, then they are clearly admitting that science is merely a byproduct of a subfield of philosophy. I am sure that most scientismists egos would not be willing to live with that. Although some similar claim could still otherwise be the case, that is not what I am attempting to prove here. Let’s focus on reasoning.

We say that an argument is valid when the truth of the claim follows from the truth of its evidence. There is a symbolic way to express this. For example:

If p, then q; p; Therefore q.

What we have here is not a statement, but rather, a statement form called Modus Ponens. It is a formula in which we can plug anything for variables p and q, and whether or not the statement is true, it will be valid according to the rules of logic. Try it for yourself! But remember, ‘validity’ and ‘truth’ are not the same thing.

The example above describes deductive reasoning; it is conceptual. Immanuel Kant called the knowledge we gain from this process a priori – knowledge which is self-justifiable. Mathematics is a classic example of deductive reasoning. It is a highly systematic construction that seems to work independent from our own experience of it, that we can also apply to processes like building a bridge.

There is another type of reasoning called inductive reasoning. It is the process of reasoning based on past events and evidence collected from those events. The type of knowledge that one gains from inductive reasoning, according to Kant, is called a posteriori. This is knowledge that is justified by experience rather than a conceptual system. For example: We reason that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has everyday for all of recorded human history. We also have empirical evidence to explain how the sun rises. However, the prediction that the sun will rise tomorrow is only a prediction, not a certainty, despite all the evidence we have that it will rise. The prediction presupposes that not one of countless possible events (Sun burns out, asteroid knocks Earth out of orbit, Earth stops rotating, etc.) will occur to prevent that from happening.

Illusions of Scientism

The mistake that scientism makes is that it claims that the methods of science are deductive when they are actually inductive. Reductive science (that which seeks to explain larger phenomena by reducing matter down to smaller parts) most commonly makes this mistake. More often than not, those “smallest parts” are laws or theories defined by mathematical formulas. Scientismists believe that the deductions made by mathematical approaches to science produce philosophically true results. They do not. The results are simply valid because they work within a strict, self-justifiable framework – mathematics. But, how applicable are mathematics to the sciences, and how strong is this validity?

“The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximation in as much as we move toward more complex situations… This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry. The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades mathematical description… In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modelling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.) of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration in the possible uses of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large… The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.”

-Rene Thom, Mathemetician

Deductive reasoning and its systems, such as mathematics, are human constructs. However, how they came to be should be accurately described. They were not merely created, because that would imply that they came from nothing. Mathematics are very logical and can be applied in important ways. However, the fact that mathematics works in so many ways should not cause us the delusion that they were discovered either, for that would imply that there is some observable, fundamental, empirical truth to them. This is not the case either. Mathematics and the laws they describe are found nowhere in nature. There are no obvious examples of perfect circles or right angles anywhere in the universe. There are also no numbers. We can count objects, yes, but no two objects, from stars to particles of dust, are exactly the same. What does it mean when we say “here are two firs” when the trees, though of the same species, have so many obvious differences?

What a statement about a number asserts, according to Gottlob Frege, is a concept, because any application of it is deductive. So, I prefer to say of such systems that they were developed. They are constructed from logic for a purpose, but without that purpose – without an answer to the question ‘why do we use them?’ – they are nonexistent. Therefore, there is a strong sense in which the application of such systems is limited to our belief in them. Because we see them work in so many ways, it is difficult to not believe in them.

Physics attempts to act as the reason, the governing body of all science, but it cannot account for all of the uncertainty that scientific problems face. Its mathematical foundations are rigid, and so are the laws that they describe. However, occurrences in the universe are not rigid at all. They are random and unpredictable and constantly evolving. Therefore, such “laws” are only guidelines, albeit rather useful ones.

As Thom states, “the public at large” is unaware of the lack of practical applications of mathematics to science, and it is precisely that illusion of efficiency that scientism, which is comprised of both specialists and non-specialists, takes for granted. It is anthropocentric to believe that, because we understand mathematics, a system we developed, we can understand everything. Humans are not at the center of the universe. We’re merely an immeasurably small part of it.

The Solution

In the same way Rene Thom explains mathematical formulas do not directly translate to chemistry and biology, deductive reasoning, more generally, has very limited application in most aspects of our everyday lives. Kids in school ask, “I’ll never use algebra; why am I learning it?” It turns out, they are absolutely right. Learning math beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is a waste of time for most. What they should be learning instead are the basics of reasoning. Deduction only proves validity, not truth, and induction has even greater limits, as David Hume and many others have pointed out. People, especially young children, are truth-seekers by nature, which is to say they are little philosophers.

There is a solution: informal logic, the study of logical fallacies – the most basic errors in reasoning. Informal logic is widely accessible and universally applicable. If people are to reason well, informal logic is the most fundamental way to start, and start young we should. Children, in fact, have a natural tendency to do this extremely well.

To be continued…