In praise of reason

In Praise of Reason

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages 1-166

  Lynch, Michael P ^a  

^a NONE

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References (126)

1. Kevin Trudeau, Natural Cures: What " They " Don't Want You to Know About (Alliance Publishing, 2006), p. 327. Among other things, Trudeau's book claims that we can change the structure of DNA just by thinking about it.
2. From a sample of 1,007 adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 1-3, 2007. See Frank Newport, " Majority of Republicans Doubt Evolution, " Gallup News Service, June 11, 2007.
3. According to an August 2006 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 62 percent of respondents said that scientists agree on the validity of evolution; " Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics, " August 24, 2006, p. 16: http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Many-Americans-Uneasy-with-Mix-of-Religion-and-Politics.aspx#3. But a Gallup poll from February 11, 2009 suggested that fewer than 4 in 10 Americans believe in evolution themselves. Frank Newport, " On Darwin's Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution, " Gallup News Service, February 11, 2009.
4. David Masci, " How the Public Resolves Conflicts Between Faith and Science, " The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, August 27, 2007. Masci is referencing a Time magazine poll from October 2006.
5. See C. Dunbar, One Nation Under God (Oviedo, Fla.: Higher Life Development Services, 2008)
6. Russell Shorto, " How Christian Were the Founders? " New York Times Magazine (February 11, 2010), pp. 32-47
7. James C. Mckinley, Jr., " Texas Conservatives Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts, " New York Times, March 10, 2010.
8. This is what the philosopher Paul Boghossian seems to suggest when he says, " [The claim] that we cannot hope to justify our principles through the use of those very principles is not true in general, it is true only in the special, albeit important case where we have legitimately come to doubt the correctness of our own principles. " Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 100.
9. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), IX, 1, pp. 272-273.
10. My invocation of Hume here is influenced by Simon Blackburn's discussion of the common point of view, and its relation to civility, in his Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 210-211.
11. See also Rachel Cohen, " The Common Point of View in Hume's Ethics, " Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 827-850.
12. J. Cohen, " Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy, " in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 72.
13. On " public reason, " see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 212-213. But where Rawls (p. 213) imbues public reasons with three functions, I am only emphasizing what he calls the " moral duty " of civility-the idea that we should aim to explain our views to each other by appeal to reasons that could, ideally, be accepted by all.
14. For a nuanced criticism of the greater Rawlsian view on public reason, see Gerald Gaus, " Reason, Justification, and Consensus, " in Deliberative Democracy, p. 214.
15. See also Habermas's critique of Rawls: " Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason:Remarks on John Rawls's Political Liberalism, " Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 109-131.
16. Jean Hampton, " Should Political Philosophy Be Done without Metaphysics? " Ethics 99 (1989): 791-814.
17. An important recent, if very different, defense of the idea that there are common epistemological principles is Robert Talisse's engaging Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Talisse argues that we in fact do possess certain common folk epistemological principles that we can appeal to in political disagreements. In contrast, I think we should have such principles in common. Chapter 5 gives the full-dress argument for why this is so.
18. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis:The Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 6.
19. A. Todorov, A. N. Mandisodza, A. Goren, and C. C. Hall, " Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes, " Science 308 (2005): 1623-1626;
20. C. Ballew II and A. Todorov, " Predicting Political Elections from Rapid and Unreflective Judgments, " Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 104 (2007): 17948-17953.
21. Ballew II and Todorov, " Predicting Political Elections, " p. 17951.
22. See in particular the work of Jonathan Haidt, e.g., J. Haidt, " The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment, " Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814-834.
23. See also J. Haidt, S. Koller, M. Dias, " Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog? " Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 613-628. Also helpful is Michael Gazzaniga's Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
24. Paul Bloom, in a recent issue of Nature, has argued, as I do below, that reason plays a role in moral judgment; see Bloom, " How Do Morals Change? " Nature 464 (2010): 490. Two recent overviews by informed nonspecialists, both of whom argue that reason has less to do with our decisions than we might think, are Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (New York:Houghton Mifflin, 2009), and David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011).
25. Drew Westen, Pavel S. Blagov, Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts, and Stephan Hamann, " Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, " Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 11 (2006):1947-1958.
26. Phaedrus, 246a-b, 253c ff. Selected Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 2001).
27. See Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). Ariely discusses numerous examples like the above, including the Amazon.com shipping policy.
28. Antonio Damasio, Descartes'Error (New York: Harper Collins, 1995) p. xv.
29. For a fascinating and influential discussion of this theme, see Jonathan Bennett, " The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn, " Philosophy 49 (1974): 123-134.
30. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 415.
31. The literature on the so-called basic emotions is huge; for a tip of the iceberg see P. Ekman, " The Argument and Evidence About Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion, " in H. Wagner and A. Manstead, eds., Handbook of Social Psychophysiology: The Biological Psychology of the Emotions and Social Processes (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), pp. 143-164. Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions in his " Basic emotions, " The Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. T. Dalgleish and T. Power (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), pp. 45-60.
32. As Catherine Elgin puts it, emotions can be justified and unjustified; see her Considered Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 149.
33. Indeed, if emotions can serve as " markers " that indicate to us salient aspects of a particular situation, they are in some sense akin to perceptions. And thus, like perceptions, they can be criticized when they don't reflect how the situation actually is. If the situation is not one that calls for anger, or gaiety or grief, then having these feelings doesn't make sense in something like the way that seeing a pink elephant in the room when there isn't one doesn't make sense. For theories that take emotions to be closely linked or identical to perceptions, see R. de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990);
34. D. Sosa, " Skepticism about Intuition " Philosophy (2006) 88: 633-648.
35. J. J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
36. Simon Blackburn, perhaps the most prominent defender of the Humean picture now writing, makes this point in his Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 265. The sophisticated Humean can say: were your motivational profile more coherent, you wouldn't be motivated to do so and so.
37. For an elaboration of this theory, see M. Lynch, " Trusting Intuition, " in P. Greenough and M. Lynch, eds., Realism and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
38. Haidt, " The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail, " p. 818.
39. T. Hoving, False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes (New York: Touchstone Press, 2006), p. 19.
40. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
41. See Haidt, " The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail, " p. 820.
42. Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), p. xv.
43. W. V. O. Quine, " Two Dogmas of Empiricism, " in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 2-3.
44. Haidt, " The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail, " pp. 814-834.
45. Lincoln Quillian, " Group Threat and Regional Change in Attitudes Toward African-Americans, " American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996), p. 826.
46. Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 18.
47. See Popkin, History of Skepticism ; and Terence Penelhum, God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983).
48. Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. R. Ariew and M. Greene (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 50.
49. The exact date of the event is open to debate. Here, I follow Richard Popkin who places it in 1628; see his History of Skepticism, p. 147. Some, including Desmond Clarke, indicate it may have happened in the autumn of the previous year; see Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 423.
50. In Descartes, Discourse on Method ; see Popkin, History of Skepticism, p. 145.
51. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 12.
52. Descartes took himself to have a reply to the charge of circularity, although the exact nature of that reply remains controversial. His response can be found in " The Fourth Replies " in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The literature on the alleged circle is vast.
53. See Michael Della Rocca, " Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology Without God, " Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2005), pp. 1-33;
54. Louis E. Loeb, " The Cartesian Circle, " in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
55. Ernest Sosa, " How to Resolve the Pyrrhonian Problematic: A Lesson from Descartes, " Philosophical Studies 85 (1997), pp. 229-249.
56. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 199 ( § 12, 1).
57. See, e.g., the Second Set of Replies in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. II, p. 101.
58. See Sosa, Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, vol. 1, pp. 130-131.
59. Including perhaps some of those involved in the Texas State School Board; see Russell Shorto, " How Christian Were the Founders? " New York Times Magazine (February 11, 2010), p. 35.
60. Contrast Thomas Nagel, in The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 5: " To reason is to think systematically in ways anyone looking over my shoulder ought to be able to recognize as correct. " Unlike the present account, Nagel holds this as a condition on reasoning simpliciter, not just the giving of reasons.
61. The Kuhnian term was suggested to me by Duncan Pritchard some years ago. For Pritchard's own take on the problem, see his " Epistemic Relativism, Epistemic Incommensurability, and Wittgensteinian Epistemology, " in A Companion to Relativism, ed. S. Hales (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 266-285.
62. See also Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 118-121.
63. This is the sort of response one might expect from those who ascribe to what is called " externalism " in epistemology. But as I argue in the text, I have no quarrel with externalists about knowledge-at least for the purposes of this book. The issue here isn't knowledge; it is the role of reason. For discussion of externalism and skepticism within the context of epistemic circularity, see Richard Fumerton, Metaepistemology and Skepticism (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 159-181;
64. Barry Stroud, " Scepticism,'Externalism,'and the Goal of Epistemology, " Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 68 (1994), pp. 291-307;
65. Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 208-213;
66. B. Reed, " Epistemic Circularity Squared? Skepticism about Common Sense, " Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006): 186-197;
67. Ernest Sosa, " How to Resolve the Pyrrhonian Problematic: A Lesson from Descartes, " Philosophical Studies 85 (1997): 229-249;
68. Sosa's " Reflective Knowledge in the Best of Circles, " Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997):410-430.
69. Richard Feldman, " Reasonable Religious Disagreements, " in Louise Antony, ed., Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 194-214;
70. David Christensen, " Epistemology of Disagreement:The Good News, " Philosophical Review 116, no. 2 (2007): 187-217.
71. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 109.
72. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 367. This passage seems at odds with some of MacIntyre's previous comments on tradition and fideism.
73. For discussion, see Mark Mitchell, " Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the Role of Tradition, " Humanitas 19 (2006): 97-125.
74. Michael Oakeshott, " Reason and the Conduct of Political Life, " in his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 56.
75. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 37.
76. Kuhn, Structure, p. 151.
77. Richard Rorty, " Universality and Truth, " in Rorty and His Critics, ed. R. B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 20.
78. Some forms of relativism may avoid this charge; see Steven Hales's view in his Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). Of course, relativisms that do avoid it may not be worth calling " relativist " ; but what is in a word?
79. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), § 110.
80. For commentary on these and related passages, see Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);
81. Duncan Pritchard, " Wittgenstein on Scepticism, " in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. O. Kuusela and M. McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
82. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 205.
83. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § § 611-612. See also Duncan Pritchard, " Epistemic Relativism, Epistemic Incommensurability, and Wittgensteinian Epistemology, " in The Blackwell Companion to Relativism, ed. S. Hales (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 266-285.
84. This appears to be MacIntyre's position; see Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, pp. 351-352.
85. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 121 ( § 5, 4-5).
86. Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. D. R. Brookes (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 33. An excellent discussion of Reid's commonsense epistemology can be found in N. Wolterstorff's Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially pp. 215-216.
87. John M. Frame, " Presuppositional Apologetics, " in Five Views on Apologetics, ed. S. N. Gundry and S. B. Cowan (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Zondervan, 2000), p. 217.
88. Vincent Cheung, " Professional Morons, " 2005. You can still access Cheung's writings on his webpage: http://www.vincentcheung.com.
89. The School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where Clifford once taught, has a useful short article on Clifford's mathematical life: " William Kingdon Clifford " by J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson; see http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Clifford.html.
90. W. K. Clifford, initially published in the Contemporary Review ; pages here refer to The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, intro. T. Madigan (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999).
91. David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), p. 47.
92. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, p. 76.
93. What I'm calling " commitment " here is drawn from L. Jonathan Cohen's notion of " acceptance " ; see his An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4.
94. See Brian Deer, " MMR Doctor Andrew Wakefield Fixed Data on Autism, " Sunday Times (February 8, 2009);
95. G. A. Poland and R. M. Jacobson, " The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationists, " New England Journal of Medicine 364, no. 2 (Jan. 2011): 97-99.
96. See Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 69.
97. See Nicholas Wade, " Harvard Finds Scientist Guilty of Misconduct, " New York Times (Aug. 20, 2010), p. A1
98. " Scientist Under Inquiry Resigns from Harvard " (July 20, 2011), p. A17.
99. There are, of course, deep issues here about the nature of scientific realism. For an excellent discussion in line with the present approach, see Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 2.
100. See Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, pp. 62-63.
101. PAST is hardly the only example of a fundamental comparative principle. Another example is:INTROSPECTION: The most reliable method for learning about our conscious mental states is by introspecting those states. This is a controversial position in the philosophy of psychology. For discussion (and criticism of the principle), see Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), chap. 4.
102. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 11.
103. William P. Alston, The Reliability of Sense Perception (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 132.
104. See Michael Fuerstein, " The Scientific Public: Inquiry in Democratic Society, " Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2009.
105. Richard Rorty, " Response to Williams, " in Rorty and His Critics, ed. R. B. Brandom (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000), p. 217.
106. Richard Rorty, " Response to Ramberg, " in Rorty and His Critics, p. 375.
107. Richard Rorty, " Universality and Truth, " in Rorty and His Critics, p. 7.
108. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);
109. for a different view, see G. Vision, Veritas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
110. Typically, the thought is that we employ a mental representational analog of a Tarskian recursive truth definition, and define the truth of a mental content in terms of something analogous to satisfaction, predicate application and denotation. See H. Field, " Tarski's Theory of Truth, " Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972): 347-375;
111. M. Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
112. For my elaboration and defense of this point with regard to claims of value, see " The Values of Truth and the Truth of Values, " in Epistemic Value, ed. A. Haddock, A. Millar, and D. Pritchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
113. Deflationists will of course allow that this is not what is going on in cases of generalizations like " Everything Socrates said was true. " But this, says the deflationist, helps make their point: the only function of " true " is to help us make such generalizations and therefore spare us the tiresome (and perhaps impossible) task of repeating everything old Socrates might have said. See Paul Horwich, Truth, 2nd edition (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998).
114. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xiii.
115. See my " Minimalism and the Value of Truth, " Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2004): 497-517;
116. for an important criticism of deflationism, see Anil Gupta, " A Critique of Deflationism, " Philosophical Topics 21 (1993):53-81.
117. The idea that there can be more than one property that plays the truth-role requires, of course, significant technical development; see my Truth as One and Many (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I first presented this view in my essay, " A Functionalist Theory of Truth, " in The Nature of Truth, ed. M. P. Lynch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001);
118. see also my " Truth and Multiple Realizability, " Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2004): 384-408.
119. The idea of supercoherence stems from Crispin Wright's notion of " superassertibility " as defined in his Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), and from the earlier ideas of C. S. Peirce.
120. For a discussion of Peirce, see Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
121. JC Beall and Greg Restall, Logical Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
122. Richard Rorty, " True to Life: Why Truth Matters, " Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2005), pp. 231-239.
123. A more detailed version of this point can be found in my Truth as One and Many (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 41-42.
124. This point was anticipated by Russell: " the objection to the coherence theory lies in this, that it presupposes a more usual meaning of truth and falsehood in constructing its coherent whole, and that more usual meaning, though indispensable to the theory, cannot be explained in terms of the theory. " Bertrand Russell, " The Monistic Theory of Truth, " reprinted in his Philosophical Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 136.
125. This is the theme in George Lakoff's Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006); see, e.g., p. 15.
126. See, e.g., Michael Savage's charmingly named Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).