Separating the Rational from the Rationalized

A friend of mine argued the other day (and for many days prior) that reasoning plays a miniscule role in our actions. We don't really act on judgments we come to by reasoning he claims but rather make up reasons to explain what we do. Reasoning, he suggests, is a function of after the fact stories we tell ourselves and others, the excuses, that is, which we offer for what we have done or intend to do. What really motivates us is more basic, he claims. It's how we feel about things which is, itself, a function he insists of our upbringing and genetic inheritance. We develop a point of view characterized by our learned and inherited inclinations and when it comes to deciding, we fall back on created narratives of explanation to justify what we have done or mean to do.

On this view, of course, there are no genuinely rational considerations or conclusions and rationality, the reliance on reasons and reasoning, is reduced to a facade we present to the world. Of course, reason exists, on his view. It's relevant to things like mathematics, problem solving in geometry, and to putting evidence together to develop useful theories in science. But in every day human life, my friend argues, reason is an illusion. How we behave towards others, who we vote for or support in politics, these things are driven by what is irrational in us or, better, a-rational. Reasoning, he argues, has got nothing to do with how we live our lives.

Is that true? If so, it means lots of things, including that the moral judgments we make, and maybe even our prudential valuational judgments, are all chimerical. We may tell ourselves we chose one path over another on the road to our destination based on a belief that it's the shortest route available to us, but is that really the best explanation? This seems counter-intuitive because it seems quite obvious that we need to take account of factors which will affect our ability to achieve our goals when operating in the world. Yet, when we move to the moral sphere it seems less so. Since Hume in the 18th century, many have embraced this account of moral judgment, that it's all about sentiment and that our sentiments are the result of our upbringing for the most part. If it is true, of course, then moral judgments lose their efficacy. And if they do, then once we come to see that, we can have no reason to make use of them, aside from using them to pretend we are something we are not to others around us.

Much rides on this question of whether or not rational considerations are no different from rationalization, after-the-fact excuse making, hiding behind a facade of reasons. Yet there is something to be said for my friend's view, isn't there? We do sometimes rationalize and it is often difficult to distinguish between when we are doing that and when we aren't. Not when it comes to mathematical reasoning of course, but that is a special case. It rests on using particular rules to play a certain sort of game, an activity defined by the use of those rules. But is life such a game? Can moral choices or, indeed, any of our practical choices, be reduced to such a system of rules, closed to any considerations outside what the rules provide?

Well we can all agree that life is not a closed system. It's lived in a world of things beyond our control, its "rules" subject to discovery by trial and error, by experience, not documentable in any complete listing of what is right to do and what is not. We choose our paths on the road to somewhere based on what we learn about their safety and ease of passage and the length of time they will take to get there and about what we know of our own capacities to meet whatever we may encounter on the road chosen. All these things are concerns we take into account and, because the world is complex and messy and clearly not finite the way any rule-based system must be, we proceed with some uncertainty. Nevertheless we do apply reasoning in making choices here. Reasoning only involves certainty when the system we are navigating is closed, when it has a complete range of fully knowable factors to account for -- even if we don't start out knowing them all fully.

We learn mathematics, after all, but what we learn are system relations which are governed by knowable rules and learning it reflects our exploration and discovery of those rules which constitute the system thus making us more at home in the system. Life in the world is kind of a system, too, but it is not confinable to a knowable collection of rules the way math is. And even systems that may be thought to have infinite complexity (or the equivalent of that relative to our human capacities), such as chess, have definable rules to be discovered and learned. Life is like that, too, but it's about more because the rules really are so vast and fluid that learning what's going on cannot be limited to moving pieces on a chess board or doing complex calculations in our heads.

Mathematics is a system we learn and maybe we haven't learned everything there is to know about it even yet. Maybe we really don't have the complete picture and future discoveries in the game of mathematics will change what we can do with it. Certainly mathematics and other human intellectual disciplines have developed over time; not all humans knew these parameters in the past, certainly not as well as some of us know them now. and even today, only some of us know them enough to be good at using them. We are not all born mathematicians or logicians but discover and learn these systems as we learn to use our mental capacities. Language, too, is a rule-based system, but unlike mathematics or logic, it is not closed. Rather it's a system that is in constant interplay with the world in which language speakers move about. It's a system for communicating (contra Chomsky) but, more, it's a responsive system, one that lives in the world in which speakers make use of it. And it's language, one might say, that carries these other capacities, these narrower systems like mathematics and chess where rules are adduced that work in some aspect of the world.

Systems like mathematics and logic (and games like chess) take form because they apply to an aspect of the world that is already prescribed through language. Because language makes picturing a world possible, superimposing order on the inchoate phenomena of impinging sensory inputs, systems like logic and mathematics also become possible because they consist of the rules by which concept formation imparts order on the inchoate. Here language is seen as a system, too, but it is one that is more open ended because its users, those who speak it, are in constant contact with their world, a world they have created out of what flows into them from outside and which, using language, they impose order on. The rules of language are a grammar and logic is the discovery of the relations inherent in that grammar just as mathematics is the discovery of the relations between the things of the world we build with our concept forming capacities. Games like chess are sub-sets of these, applied to particular parts of the world. In the end, it's all just systems and their capacity to endure depends on their efficacy for users in the arenas in which they will be put to use.

So what explains this distinction between reasoning and rationalizing and why do they seem to be fungible concepts, one shading into the other in discussions? And why do some, like my friend, arrive at the conclusion that when we reason in order to act we are doing no more than pretending? Why do some think reasons, as motivators of action, have nothing to do with our choices? Perhaps the real answer is just to be found in pragmatics, in the idea that reasoning is not so much about deducing conclusions from the meanings of the terms, from the concepts that make them up, in the old classical sense of reasoning (as logical deduction), but in interacting with our world.

When we think of choosing a road to somewhere (or a means to get us there) we know that there is a non-finite realm of possibilities and even choosing to attend to them in making our choice, there is still a degree of uncertainty. Some will be recognized, others not. Some will given consideration and some will not and we cannot be sure when we have made the right choices in these matters, not absolutely sure in any case. The world is not a closed system but one in which we are in constant contact, reacting to its feedback, making our choices by responding to that feedback or to our anticipations of it. Here reasoning makes sense because it's not about deducing certain conclusions from a definite number of premises which exhaust the universe of possibilities. It's about making the best choices given some defined range of possibilities, a range we set based on experience but without having absolute certainty that we have got the range right.

Reasoning is a way of interacting with our world, a way defined by the fact that we have the capacity to conceptualize and thus organize, by arranging and sorting our sensory inputs into things in a world. We have this capacity because we have language and language is the open ended response of creatures like ourselves to a steady bombardment of information through the senses, impingements on us which we turn into objects and relations, that is, which we turn into information, the kind that means something to us. Language enables us to give form to the formless and it is in having form that the rules of logic and mathematics and, indeed, of reasoning itself, take off and become guides for us. So is my friend right that reasoning is an illusion?

Perhaps, if we consider it as a formal process of proceeding from premises to conclusions, which are derivable from the meanings inherent in the premises themselves. Seeking to apply reasoning in this sense to the world does seem incorrect precisely because the world is not a closed system. Indeed, on this view neither are logic or mathematics or any of the other things we do with our linguistic capabilities because, as derivatives of the concept forming capacity language provides us, they are also dependent on the open nature of the world. Reasoning is certainly not limited to the rather narrow view which makes it about deduction. Rather it is driven by the ways in which the world affects us, it is our reaction to that world using the language capacities we, as thinking creatures, possess. We reason pragmatically for it is precisely these kinds of considerations drive our rational judgment.

My friend would argue that it's all already baked into who and what we are and that we have no conscious control of that. We are the creatures of our genes and our upbringing and the reasoning we think we resort to is just part of an illusion, a trick the world plays on us. In reality, says he, we just act -- and tell ourselves why afterwards. But on this view making the choices we make comes down to clout, doesn't it? Our judgments of an ethical type are then just part of the trick. In fact, on this view, the ethical must give way to the idea of clout as in who has enough of it to get his way. "Might makes right" in other words.

My view is more nuanced. Better to say that rationality is the process we go through to sort and rank our reasons in order to settle on an idea that motivates action and that we have many different factors and parameters along the way with which to effect that sorting and ranking. Rationality, the ancient Greeks and the philosophers who followed them notwithstanding, is not about selectively moving from premises to conclusions based on the conceptual content contained in the premises but on fitting those concepts we use to the world as we find it. Here reasoning is seen as a kind of self-adjusting response to the pressures of experience, of what the world demands of us if we are to respond to it most effectively.

Reasoning, seen this way, amounts to the activity of using the conceptual frame language affords us to find the best responses to whatever confronts us. Thus it rests on, and concerns itself with, pragmatics, not conceptual implication in the abstract, which is to say as being apart from effects in the world. And this is how reasoning works in other contexts, too. In legal reasoning, we work with legislated precepts or norms. They are no less a part of the world than the visual and other sense-related "observations" we take in and organize in conceptual ways. Norms are as real as the things they govern our responses to and moral norms are just as real. As with other norms, they are as much a part of our world as the observables we take to constitute it are.

Reasoning, seen in this way, is not the same as rationalizing, though both concern themselves with finding and making justifying claims. In the second case, the case my friend takes as paradigmatic, our reasons do provide a facade which we can and sometimes do erect to protect our judgments from criticisms. But in the first case they are substantive and, thus, motivating. They are about the process we engage in when we pick our way through the world we have conceptualized. But such reasoning is not about moving from conceptual meaning, via implication, to a decision to act. It's about wrestling out the consequences before us if we go down one path rather than another and hoping to get them right most of the time.

Those consequences may not always be predictable but they are real. They will have effects and the job of reasoning is to try to anticipate them as effectively as possible. And this is as much the case in matters of ethical judgments and the reasons we adduce for them as in any other judgment. Reasoning is a way of interacting with our world, not of constructing and working through syllogisms which, at best, serve to depict some particular set of conceptual relations. Real reasoning is about navigating our environmental inputs in what is a uniquely human way because of the human capacity to turn a range of sensory inputs into a world of spatial and temporal relations, one which also situates the speakers, the reasoners, in the world with everything else.