Reasons and Causes
We are not as rational as we think we are
”We are not as rational as we think we are.1 What I mean by this is that we think our beliefs and attitudes, and even our feelings and moods, are more determined by a reasoning process that brings us to them than they are.
We think that we are in control of such mental states through their being the result of a reasoning process over which we have control. We might make mistakes in our reasoning, or reason from false premises, but that is something which we have the power to work at and get right. We are not thereby just brought to a belief or attitude or mood (from now on I shall simply group these under ‘mental stances’) by a series of steps over which we have no control, that rather we are at the behest of.
That process is causal, that is to say non-rational. This contrasts not only with the rational but also with processes that are irrational, that is to say, that involve going against what reason indicates, when going with what reason indicates is what we should do. If a tree falls on someone’s head, what leads up to it is a series of non-rational causal factual events or steps that are neither rational nor irrational, but are rather a matter of what happens or does not happen. Whereas with the rational we are looking at a process, or series of steps that are normative, that is to say, they may involve a judgement or account of what should or should not2 be occurring in the process regardless of what in fact does or does not happen. So that if someone writes ‘2+2=’, and we are asked to write what follows the ‘=’, we should write ‘4’. It is not a matter considered as a process of reasoning of the 4 in any way being merely determined by factual causal processes, rather we should write ‘4’ in the normative sense of it being the right answer, and not the wrong one. With processes considered merely as non-rational causal ones, right and wrong, making a mistake or not, does not come up, rather it is simply a matter of what happens or does not happen.
That we are not as rational as we think we are may seem a disturbing or depressing conclusion, but I shall go on to show why this is not wholly the case, especially if we accept and are aware that we are less rational than we think we are.
First, we must note that we should not, should not want to, control and determine our mental stances, indeed our very lives, in all instances, by reason.
Some things we think of as being appropriately and rightly determined by reason. There are many examples of this, and not only among the obvious such as mathematics. We might be considering the best path to get us home quickly from a walk, or whether to buy a particular house given our enlarged family, or whether to move to another job; these are at least best partly deliberated on and reasoned about.
Other matters seem outside the scope of the appropriate reason. We sit enjoying a beautiful sunset, we fall in love with someone, we look adoringly at our firstborn child. These are not matters we should think it right to reason about too much, we should simply accept them for what they are. If your partner asks you if you love them, the last thing they will want to hear is: ‘Now let me think about it and work it out’ – if you have to do that you probably do not and in any case have missed the point. Of course, such a thing might be said as a joke, and it precisely is a joke because of the ludicrousness of suggesting that you have a good reasoned think about it and that you will let them know at the end what conclusion you should come to. Well, that’s romantic love if one admits it happens at all. I give this only by way of example. You might as well apply the same argument to whether you are enjoying the meal you are eating – it is not a matter apt for being a conclusion at the end of a string of logical rational steps – you simply are or you are not enjoying the meal.
The question is why any of this is important. And it is the importance I am concerned with. The aim is not primarily to argue for the claim that we are less rational than we think we are. That would be the subject of another essay, possibly partly based on an empirical study. For the sake of this essay, I shall simply appeal to people’s experience of themselves and how they honestly, when they reflect on it for a while, come to many of their mental stances. What I have done is made clear the distinction between the rational route to a mental stance and a non-rational causal route to a mental stance. So in that case we at least know what we are talking about in each case. That is not to say they cannot and should not be combined. So let us assume the premise is true, that we are less rational than we think we are, or at least someone might accept it as true. So the appeal is to self-awareness and self-knowledge. Something one may admit some people seem to have more than others.
We might suppose, as was said, that our being less rational than we think we are is a deeply depressing conclusion. Is not the case that being rational is a ‘good thing’. The idea that our cherished mental stances are playthings of causal forces over which we may have little control – as when a hundred dominos are set up to tumble one on the other following the first one pushed over – unbounded by the strictures of reason, might appear a gloomy and even frightening conclusion. But this would be a mistake.
This is for two reasons. The first involves appropriateness and the second involves an opportunity.
The appropriateness involves pointing out what has already been outlined, that there are occasions when coming to our mental stances not by the way of a reasoning process is a perfectly correct thing to do. Do I love my daughter? If you are trying to get to what you should answer to that by a rational argument and evidence-gathering process, then you are completely missing the point. Nor should we, to our consolation, be castigating or berating ourselves for mental stances, sometimes unpleasant ones, for our not having greater rational control over the mental stances we have, where the causal non-rational forces are powerful and as often bewilderingly unknown in their origin. In many of these circumstances, we can forgive ourselves, while exercising our self-knowledge, or at least self-awareness. We might do something about it if there are mental stances we wish to avoid, once we are aware that it is not reason that has failed, but something about the circumstances that generate the mental stances.
The second matter is the opportunity. For if we are aware that we are often not as rational as we think we are, we can guard against the hubris of thinking on important occasions that we are rational and unswayed – unlike others, we may self-satisfyingly tell ourselves – by non-rational influences when we should not be but should instead be applying reason.
If we think ourselves remarkably rational, and above non-rational causes, then we are unlikely to be on the lookout for them. As the writer and journalist Ludovic Kennedy succinctly put it, for those who are hubristically superior to others in their reckoning of themselves as incorruptible reasoners: ‘It’s always someone else’. Through a lack of over-self-regard as to our rational prowess, we can be on our toes to see off causal influences – peer pressure, the wonderfully orated speech, our own background and habits – that might make us reason less well or not at all when we should. To reason well, it is not enough to know what good reasoning is. A lot of the most intelligent men and women have been led astray in their reasoning, or not reasoned at all, on their way to conclusions and actions, to their mental stances.3 Without getting to the point where you accept that you are less rational than you think you are you will not even start, when you should, to do something about it, let alone take advantage of the insight.
Some non-rational influences are easier to control than others. We might avoid them by leaving situations where they occur, getting into the habit of questioning things we find difficulty in questioning (rather than the opposite of firming up our commitment – we are keeping an open mind by any other name) and being self-aware, which although a hard trick to pull off sometimes as not getting to the state of self-awareness may be precisely our weakness, and getting there may involve loss of face, of pride, and the shame and opprobrium of admitting one is wrong. This may just be a case, if we are reasoning at all, of questioning the premises an argument is built on. Some influences and forceful circumstances, as has been stated, are perfectly natural and proper on the other hand, and we should not beat ourselves up for not being in rational control. There is the causally determined brain, the seat of consciousness, a brain of whose non-rational workings we know relatively little and cannot ourselves access, and which may put us in mental stances without recourse to reasoning processes – though we may have influence through what we think and do.
How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for?
Just because you are smart does not mean you cannot be fooled. Indeed, thinking yourself smart may lead you to think you are too smart to be fooled, making it more likely that you will be fooled. Whereas if you think yourself not smart, it could work the other way, and you might be more on your guard against being fooled because you think, not being smart, you might be more likely to be fooled. We like to think our cleverness and our education, are protection against wrong and ill-formed mental stances. But evidence suggests otherwise.
In sum, we are not as rational as we think we are. But we can use this very knowledge, if we can get ourselves to accept that it is so, to deal with non-rational causal influences on our mental stances in a way, when appropriate, so as not to entertain mental stances we should not. We can counter non-rational causal influences by other non-rational causal influences of our own devising, sometimes through a mere decision or act of will, but more generally and pervasively through building up good mental habits – such as routinely getting used to questioning things that make us feel uncomfortable questioning or that we take for granted. It’s like building up a muscle through routine exercise for those occasions when it is needed in earnest – in a fight, running away from a predator, saving someone in trouble.
As David Hume might say, arguments only work against arguments. If a tree is falling on you there is no point in trying to reason with it. You have to do something else. There is nothing wrong with reason, just with the overestimation of the power of reason to get us reasoning when that is what we should be doing. In that case, we have to use causes against causes so that the result is that we reason when we should, or simply get ourselves into better mental stances.
In this way, from the premise of our not being as rational as we think we are, we may indeed be more rational, when it is apt to be so, more likely to reach a mental stance that is true and appropriate, less likely to reach mental stances insupportable by reason or at variance with what they should be.
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Dr John Shand is a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the Open University. He studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and King’s College, University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and the Open University. The author of numerous articles, reviews, and edited books, his own books include, Arguing Well (London: Routledge, 2000) and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2014).
Contact information:
- Dr John Shand, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
- https://open.academia.edu/JohnShand
- http://fass.open.ac.uk/philosophy/people
John Shand on Daily Philosophy:
Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash.
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The ideas here are expanded on and dealt with in a different context in John Shand, Arguing Well (London: Routledge, 2000). ↩︎
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One might write ‘ought or ought not’. ↩︎
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The Nazi government in WW2 used to deliberately send out PhD students to pep up the resolve of the Einsatzgruppen knowing that they would be more articulate in justifying the need for the mass shootings of Jews and others. Many doctors of that period in Germany, presumably not stupid men, but rather ones who perhaps prided themselves on their intellectual mastering of the complex subject of medicine, happily went along with mass forced sterilizations of the mentally deficient and the disabled, as well as experimenting on the inmates of concentration camps. The question is why would people, adept at reasoning, intelligent well-educated young men, conclude that these abominations were the right thing to do. It was not because they did not know how to follow a rational argument. ↩︎
