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Reason is a funny thing. We tend to place almost limitless confidence in our ability to utilize logic to reach informed conclusions, yet anyone who has attended a family Thanksgiving or taken a road trip with a friend knows that what may seem clear-cut and logical to you is anything but to someone else.
What then are we to make of this capacity to rationalize and predict outcomes that can enable both cooperation and fierce disagreement?
In classical philosophy, it is reason which sets humankind apart from other species; we are rational animals. Certain strains of post-modernist thought would deconstruct that notion entirely, seeing logic as a tool often used by those in power to continue to wield their power. The cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber suggest that it is actually neither of these things in their The Enigma of Reason.
While we often feel assured of our ability to reason correctly, reams of social science research suggest that our faith is quite often misplaced. We are prone to flights of logic, and we often believe the narratives we create for ourselves long past the point of their being functional. This jarring dissonance has been an object of fascination for many, from the psychologists and philosophers who debate to what extent reason and inference are the same and where those capacities are located in our consciousness, all the way to those conversations we have all had in which, despite all the evidence you might present, your conversation partner seems incapable of changing their mind.
Mercier and Sperber believe that reason's main utility is in our interactions with others, not sitting alone in our rooms and philosophizing. Reason is what enables us to explain our thoughts and actions to others. As the parent of two small children, my partner and I model this daily.
While parents can simply tell their children what to do and not to do, they learn far more effectively if parents also explain the rationale behind their actions. We don't touch hot objects on the stove because they could burn us, we look both ways before crossing the street to make sure that cars aren't coming from either direction, we apologize if we misunderstood what they were saying and took away their plate before they were finished.
Using reason as this rationalization tool helps children, and adults too, of course, build up a repertoire of behaviors that can be generalized beyond the situation immediately at hand. If my daughter learns why it's best to see if cars are coming before crossing the street, chances are the same behavior will carry over to other streets in Chicago, to London while on vacation, or while in Bolivia to see family.
It is an interesting facet of what it means to be human that we have developed the skill to evaluate others' arguments quite well but often are not nearly as critical of our own thoughts and behaviors. While on the face of it this may appear surprising, since Freudian psychoanalysis has taught that many of our deepest motivations and struggles remain a mystery to us. So where does that leave us at the Thanksgiving dinner table?
Some humility would be helpful for starters. It is clear from the research that we don't do a good job of listening to others when they offer critiques of our line of thinking. However, because reason is primarily a capacity used to rationalize within one's identified community, it's worth thinking about what our interlocutor's community is when faced with a seemingly impenetrable opinion. For most of American history, it has been assumed that our common heritage and beliefs in essential American values make us capable of reasoning with each other, but in our ever more polarized time, perhaps that's no longer true. Not necessarily a hopeful thought, but something to think about and use our reason to evaluate.
