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Chapter 4

A Need for Standards

We are fallible, but we are not incompetent. Certainly not as incompetent as we might have thought based on the initial experimental results about our cognition. Instead, we were asking the wrong questions about our reasoning. We were expecting our cognition to have a very different goal than the one it seems to have. Our cognition evolved to make us better at surviving. As social beings, our survival depended heavily on fitting into our societies. Leading those societies would be even better, of course. It makes sense that evolution might consider social influence much more important than truth. Having reasonable ideas about the world still matters, of course. Jumping from the top of a precipice due to social pressure would not be a good adaptation. That is trivial and, indeed, such trivial matters are rarely the subject of disagreement. But most ideas we can hold about the world are less damaging than jumping from precipices. For many ideas, fitting into the group might have been much better for our ancestors’ survival than looking for the best explanations. Convince your peers and, that failing, agree with them.

Convincing requires being well adjusted to what our group considers a solid argument. Obvious falsehoods will be rejected easily by our opponents, and we always have rivals inside our groups. Competition for the most prestigious positions might be unavoidable, but less obvious mistakes—those other people might not notice—can provide good strategies. Combine that with the observation that we tend to accept arguments in favor of conclusions we like without much critical thinking. That suggests we might have acceptable but wrong forms of argumentation and discourse that work inside groups. Those forms don’t need a logical basis. As long as they work, they will be useful.

We see difference in the criteria of what makes a solid argument all the time. Some groups act as if testimonial evidence should be taken at face value. Others consider that there is one source of knowledge, be that a person or a book, that is so authoritative that we can trust it to always tell the truth. The arguments based on those assumptions often work well inside restricted cultural groups. The same arguments, however, fail to convince any outsiders. Outsiders, with good reason, see those arguments as simple strategies of convincing, with too little actual logical strength.

If we want to correct our observed tendencies to stick to our own ideas, we need very good tools. We need solid standards that can help us avoid our own cognitive pitfalls, but we must be wary of our tendency to choose standards that would benefit our points of view. Our own standards might be good and solid. However, if we want to be safe, we should not trust our own ability to evaluate them. After all, even very intelligent people seem to fall prey to distorting arguments to defend their views. It seems that, if we want to be safe, we need to check our reasoning against those who disagree with our conclusions. If they disagree on our opinion but can’t find a flaw in our methods, that does add much more credence to those methods than if they had been checked by someone who agrees with the conclusions.

In general terms, that means we’d better look for standards that are universal. Those standards should be so clear and obvious no sane individual could challenge them. That does not avoid the possibility that every human might be insane and agree with a wrong logic. If that were the case, however, there would be nothing we could do anyway. So, we assume we are not that insane, hope that will work, and move on.

The aim of this search, therefore, is to identify and avoid mistakes. If only some people see an argumentation strategy as valid, there is a good chance they might be wrong at their assessment. That is especially true when those who consider a reasoning tool valid are the same ones who use those tools to defend their points of view. Avoiding the possibility of mistakes requires us to avoid those one-sided strategies. To do better, we should remember that we tend to excuse those who agree with us too easily (Claassen and Ensley 2015). But that is counterproductive. What we want is to point out errors whenever they happen, even when they are committed by our group. If we care about learning the best explanations, we probably should be even more insulted by wrong behavior at our favorite side, as that is the type of behavior that can discredit even good theories.

An exception must be made for competence, of course. Criticisms to a method by people who do not know how to use it is not something we need to worry about. Quite the opposite, the criticism is easy to understand from the point of view of defending one’s arguments. Take the example of those who do not trust mathematics. If someone does not understand a way of arguing, that person is at a disadvantage when that way is used, so it is natural to feel a need to oppose it. That means we should look for standards that are universally accepted by people who know how to use them competently.

Are there modes of reasoning solid enough for our purpose of diminishing errors? The first step is to ask what we mean by solid enough. By that I do not mean that they will actually end the possibility humans will make mistakes; that seems to be unavoidable. But there might be ways that allow our arguments to be inspected for errors. That is, we are looking for tools we can use to detect erroneous reasoning. Those tools should be such that, when errors are found, we would all agree there is a mistake there.

As discussed above, acceptance of those tools should be universal. They might need a lot of training to understand and use, of course; but anyone who learns how to use them should be able to agree with the conclusion. A sound argument should be seen as sound by any person who understand the rules of sound argumentation. That way, we can hope that our preferences for particular ideas should not interfere with our conclusions. Or, at least, they should interfere as little as possible.

Luckily, those modes of argumentation do exist. In the cards problem, once we understand it, we all agree which cards can prove the rule is false and which ones cannot. Disagreeing with the conclusion—once we understand the problem well—seems to be a form of insanity, an incapacity to perform the most basic reasonings. Of course, species insanity is possible, even if we guess it would be improbable, but that is a possibility we might be forced to ignore if some solution is to be found. We can do the best we possibly can, but no better than that.

Logical reasoning and sound philosophical arguments are natural places to start the search. Those areas have been trying for millennia to achieve certainty (if that were possible at all) or something close to that. Solid reasoning is an old problem, one where we have not found a final solution yet or, as we will see, a complete solution that can actually be implemented.

Such a task might sound identical to the basic positivism program. In particular, by placing logical reasoning as a high standard, the similarities to Bertrand Russell’s (Whitehead and Russell 2011) and Rudolf Carnap’s ([1937] 2002) approaches are obvious. But we have learned since those brave attempts that basing knowledge on pure logic faces too many difficulties that have never been solved. Attempts to reduce mathematics to no more than a consequence of logic have failed. More than that, both Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem (Godel 1962) as well as Alfred Tarski’s undefinability theorem (Tarski 1983) clearly show that such a program might not be feasible.

Logicism has a deep problem, if it were to be used as the basis for defining knowledge about the world. Its goal was to establish logic as the basis for mathematics. It was assumed that, once we had mathematics, physics and the description of the world would follow. That program, however, was in a deep contradiction with its own goal of avoiding metaphysics. Assuming that mathematics is the actual language of the universe is not something we should do lightly. We just don’t know if that is the case. We can say mathematics has allowed incredible advances in our scientific knowledge as well as in our technologies. The results of using it are unexpectedly precise. That means it is very reasonable to wonder if mathematics plays a central role in the universe. While the question is perfectly valid, we have no reason to answer it one way or another with any degree of certainty. Whatever answer we choose is no better than an educated guess. Mathematics is incredibly useful. If we do aim to find standards of reasoning, we can use mathematical reasoning if it is solid enough, but we cannot be sure the world obeys it or not, certainly not at this point of investigating the problem. We should not trust the intuition of those who love mathematics any more than we could trust the complaints of those who are unable to use it. We must remain skeptic about its role in the universe, unless we find unquestionable evidence that it is indeed the case that the universe was built from mathematics. As we will see, understanding how we can confirm—or not—a mathematical theory about the real world has many problems. Applying logic to that task is less straightforward than most scientists know—or even imagine.

If we do not find evidence, we can still try to use logic to prove how the world is, but we will need to find a different road. We still need to correct our human tendencies to defend ideas instead of verifying which ones are better. Giving up any attempts at finding certainty might prove to be unavoidable, given the tools we have today. Our next step is to investigate what logical and mathematical methods can actually say. We need to understand their limitations. Even if logic is as solid as possible as a reasoning tool, we must know what conclusions it allows about the world—if any at all.

My goal in this book is to explore what we can do in our search for correct answers while avoiding the traps our rationality seems to impose on us. If your main objective is only to fit inside your group, experimental results suggest you might already be well adapted. Though not perfectly adapted, there is always room for improvement when using finite resources, but we seem to be already quite competent at that task. In that case, your intuition should serve you well. Your reasoning will make the proper adjustments. It will also probably prevent you from noticing evidences that your group might be wrong.

If, on the other hand, your goal is, as I hope it is, to look for best answers and to get as close as possible to correct ideas, you must be wary of your intuition. That is the road we will take here. We had to see how well and why we reason; to understand we must look for more solid grounds for knowledge than our own natural argumentation. The search for epistemological methods has often been based on what we feel to be correct. Quite often, there was also an assumption that scientists are doing it right, even if they cannot explain the details. Science is too successful. At least in those areas where advances have been more spectacular, the argument goes, researchers should be working as well as possible. That assumption might seem a good first approximation, but its logic is flawed. We need to state clearly what we know and what we do not know. There is indeed very strong evidence science has been far more successful than all other attempts at understanding the world, but that is a relative comparison. When you notice one method worked better than its competitors, it becomes very plausible to say that method is better. But being better is very different from being the best possible method. As scientists are humans, they are bound to suffer from the same bias common to all humans.

That means that we must try to avoid as much as possible any arguments based on what we feel to be correct. Looking at arguments of that type might be interesting, to see how and when they might go wrong. To do that, we need ways to inspect them, and we need to be on more solid ground. Therefore, we will investigate how far we can get if we only accept very solid reasoning, that is, arguments of the type any sane (and intelligent) person would consider correct. The first step, therefore, is to keep going until we find and understand standards that allow us to say something about the world—and then see what that something is and what it is not.

References

Carnap, R. (1937) 2002. The Logical Syntax of Language. Open Court.

Claassen, R. L., and M. J. Ensley. 2015. “Motivated Reasoning and Yard-Sign Stealing Partisans: Mine Is a Likable Rogue, Yours Is a Degenerate Criminal.” Political Behavior, 1–19.

Godel, K. 1962. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. New York: Basic Books.