Reasonableness

Where is the Middle of Nowhere?

I want to examine our use of the word “reasonable” – the way we use it to describe the beliefs and behavior of an individual, and the way we use it to describe systems of thought or particular claims made by them. Our judgments regarding the reasonableness about the thoughts and actions of people, their worldviews, morality and ways of life, are admittedly more instinctive in comparison to the scrutiny with which we (are supposed to) examine the claims made by intellectual disciplines, though these claims may in-turn be believed by individuals in a way that is deeper than an academic’s belief in her thesis. I have deliberately avoided the use of the word “rational”, firstly, because that word is too deeply associated with a proper philosophical tradition with which this essay will not be directly concerned, and secondly, since few would deny that the word is not loaded even outside its traditional context. “Reasonable”, thus, seems to me to carry a sense of the everyday, a notion about which I could say a little and not be accused of implying what I did not intend- arguments and associations that defenders or skeptics about rationality have made in the past. But, the reader will realize, this is all a bit gimmicky, as the discussion will eventually amount to “reasonableness” being synonymous with “rationality” as it moves on.

Since it is an everyday concept that we are talking about, one used instinctively (perhaps intuitively), but at the same time employed in a sophisticated and measured manner (and what is most important- it is a notion about which we have disagreements, sometimes even with our own minds), we find ourselves, at the very beginning of the investigation, with our feet on two boats- on the one hand we want to know what makes something (a claim, an action, a system) reasonable, and perhaps the answer to this question will be a principle, or a list of them, resembling an instruction manual. On the other hand, we would be quite unhappy if our investigation concludes that most of what we already hold to be reasonable, our senses and intuitions of what is reasonable prior to our formal reflections on it, turns out to be nonsense. This is not to say that we are not ready to abandon any of our intuitions about reasonableness. Our unhappiness simply implies that the investigator probably did not do what he set out to do- to examine, rather I should say “describe”, the everyday use of the word, and that if our everyday modes of judgment are in fact nonsense, we may rightly respond that our life does not seem to be quite so chaotic as a fundamental belief in nonsense would lead to. At this point, someone might accuse these unhappy folk of asking for too much- they want to be told how to be reasonable, but at the same time be told, rather praised for, how they are reasonable anyway. The accuser might go on- that the perception of their life as not being chaotic is a result of their nonsense unreasonableness, and that a valid (and reasonable)analysis of our notion of reasonableness should not be conducted so as to lead to a predestined conclusion, for nothing good comes out of this except a complacent sense of certainty, and this is no place for complacency, for it is not a trivial question: what we are talking about is how one should think.

How honest can we be in our examination of our own reasonableness is a question I will come to in the sections that follow, but it seems fitting to note that these same anxieties also surface in discussions about our morality. The trimming-the-hedges way of dealing with ethics, of succumbing to our pre-reflective sense of just and unjust, right and wrong, fair and unfair, and removing only what is blaringly or alarmingly inconsistent and contradictory, is seen by many as a charade, an exercise in pandering to ourselves, and more seriously, as evidence of our closed-mindedness and our ignorance of the series of realizations and revolutions that our moral conscience (if we still have one) has undergone throughout history. After all, a slave owner could just as easily maintain his beliefs, and to our horror, justify them by thinking about his world-view in this way. What we want is a way of thinking about our morality that has an unavoidable force about it, whose conclusions once derived, in the absence of any pandering or logical distortion, we will never be able to run away from, and thus, we will either be entombed in guilt and shame if we don’t open ourselves unto them, or if we do so, we will be painfully changed forever and will not have to change anymore. I am exaggerating, of course, but how inconsiderate can we be about our present morality while thinking about an ideal ethical system, and more importantly, how much (and what exactly) should we expect from such an investigation, will also be taken up later. Another similarity, we may note, is that both points of view are concerned about our reasonableness and morality not simply for an intellectual closure, but because there is something inherently prescriptive and valuable about these notions: it is good to be reasonable; it is good to be moral. A further and daring leap, needing much qualification, would be to say that it is reasonable to be moral and vice-versa. This is true, barring one exception, of which we will now say something, for it seems appropriate to talk a little about the opposite of reasonableness- unreasonableness in its many forms.

There are two kinds of criticisms directed towards the alleged reasonableness of a belief, action, claim or system of thought. The first kind includes criticisms that highlight some falsity, inconsistency, naiveté, dishonesty, what-have-you. It is inconsistent to believe that people should be able to do whatever they want and at the same time that they should not be unnecessarily hurt, both cannot be upheld at the same time in many situations. What begs some questions are beliefs derived from false assumptions, and whether these beliefs and (more importantly) the actions that imply them, like going to the temple or obeying a king as if he were God, are strictly-speaking unreasonable, or more interestingly, whether such practices have always been unreasonable. It is also interesting to ask whether actions stemming from an incapacity or a decision not to think beyond a point are also unreasonable. Our first response would be to say yes, because we think about the case of the negligent rash driver who did not think enough about the innocent pedestrian. In fact, unreasonable seems to be an inadequate and understated description in that case. But what about someone who negligently hurts one’s own self, maybe not as severely as an addict might, but quite considerably nevertheless, perhaps by making a wrong career choice. If we equate being moral with being reasonable, and thus if we feel it is immoral not to think enough, something tells us that the poor bloke, who made a wrong choice and suffered all by himself, does not now deserve to be called immoral, and that it is alright for certain cases of negligent lack of thinking to have nothing to do with morality, unless it hurts another person, but more on this later. It is wrong for a person on trial to have a false alibi, and we say that they were deliberately inconsistent, attempting to deceive us, and therefore dishonest. Dishonesty differs from inconsistency, for the former is a motive for saying/doing something unreasonable, while the latter is a property of unreasonableness. Another kind of dishonesty, of which many and most are accused, is deeper, that of prejudice, or worse, ideology, of doing one’s best to mask some arbitrary nonsense as reasonable, or worse still, of not knowing that one is doing so, of being naïve. But all these criticisms have something in common; they have to do with something not being reasonable enough. There is another kind of criticism, more radical, which is skeptical about the notion of reasonableness itself, as if it were a tool of oppression or a naïve illusion or a prison house we seem to build ourselves but, fortunately for some and unfortunately for others, cannot escape. I want to avoid the use of philosophical jargon as best as I can, so I will not use the word “relativism” a lot, for I think that word obscures some of the innocent reasons why people believe in that doctrine, even if the doctrine itself is obscure. Two clarifications, in this much muddied territory, seem to me most required- if there is no such thing as reasonableness, are all our choices, thoughts and actions like our decision to eat vanilla ice-cream over butterscotch? Is it all a matter of taste or preference? Or does the illusion of reasonableness affect, in any significant way, the nature of our voluntary waking life? The second question has to do with the reasons for being skeptical of reasonableness- whether this is due to there being no Archimedean point, no self-justifying starting point of our inquiry into reasonableness (or morality, leading to the skepticism about ethics)? Or whether this skepticism is due to the high degree of complexity that our notion of reasonableness (and morality) carries?

This essay mainly deals with those two questions and what they imply. It would be foolish to pretend that most of the arguments were products of my own mind. I have culled most of what follows from the works of two philosophers- Bernard Williams and Hilary Putnam. I don’t begin every sentence with “Williams/Putnam thinks or argues or believes”, since that would make this essay quite boring, and I cannot afford to do so since their subject matter is boring enough.

Words have no Words for Words that are not True

It is unreasonable not to believe in the truth, or to put it less majestically, not to believe in statements that are true. This implies something more than the unreasonableness of believing a false statement- that it is also unreasonable to resist believing in the truth, if such a willful ignorance is possible in the first place. This is more relevant in the case of ethical considerations- when one’s actions are motivated by falsehoods due to one’s innocent ignorance. Or even in those cases when they are justified by sound reasons, but we believe that they were actually performed for other reasons, i.e., we think the justifications are dishonest, amounting to excuses. What does this mean? A person can lie about her reasons for performing an action (which includes utterances) and can get away with it if we conclude that those reasons would in fact lead her to perform the same action. I cannot justify looking at my classmate’s answer sheet by innocently pleading to my teacher that “I thought cheating was allowed” even if I really thought that this was the case. I can, however, hope to avoid punishment by saying that my neck was craned in the direction of his answer-sheet for no reason, that I did not even realize it was so. It is then left to my teacher to judge if this (lack of) reason for doing what I did really corresponded with my (lack of) deliberations prior to (involuntarily) performing the action. If it does not correspond, I will be accused of dishonestly making excuses. This, of course, involves the interpretation of behavior, which relies on our sense of how people different from us, with particular dispositions, desires and habits, would act in particular situations. The issue, more so in the law (and the novel), is about how accurate and particular our understanding of the person and the situation can/should be, and how much should we trust our ability to simulate the reasons of another mind given this information.

There is another sense in which people tend to (retrospectively) justify their actions, but we think those justifications do not correspond with a person’s internal reasons. However, this is not because we think that the person is being mendacious about her intentions. You are studying the behavior of a religious person, someone who usually visits the temple daily. You observe, over a fairly long duration, the effects that her temple-going (and other ritualistic) activities have on her behavior. You also conduct this same study for other people (God-fearing and atheists) living in the same conditions as her. There will be times when she fails to go to the temple, or perhaps lands up there when it is empty, or is late for an important service, or simply feels too lazy to go. These will, I am assuming, affect her behavior (or mental-state(s)), in ways that are apparent and obscure, both to her and to us. Given the entire observational data you have collected about other similar people, you will be able to conclude how temple-going activities (roughly) affect such a person’s behavior. Let us say the person grows morose whenever she fails to go to the church for Sunday mass. If one asks her the reasons for her gloom on such days, either she doesn’t seem to be too aware of her own dispositions or she seems to blame it on something else, and in some cases, when she does relate her sadness to not going to church, she says something like “It is a sin not to go there!” or “It is my duty to visit that place!”. The catch, though, is that we observe no drastic change in her behavior when she fails to go to church on other less-festive days. The converse of these cases would be when she is particularly joyous after having attended Sunday mass and not so jubilant after attending church on other less-festive days. We may wonder why the idea of sin and duty does not perturb her when she fails to go to church on more boring occasions, since her internal reasons for action, in this case, do not consistently explain her behavior. We may instead conclude that there is something about the community at church which is appealing to her, and that this is at least one of the reasons why she visits that place. This latter statement, the why-explanation, is a leap: from saying that an activity affects a person in a certain way, to saying that they do the activity to be affected in that way. But what about her own expressed internal reasons, about sin and duty? We may respond by saying that they are not the real reasons, but this is not to highlight her dishonesty. We recognize that some actions we perform are for reasons we are not fully aware of, and we recognize this because as time passes, we have a sense of the real reasons ourselves. If this wasn’t the case, the sense of our past selves being naïve, the sense of regret, would not exist. The sociologist might go further by trying to understand why it is that she provides those very internal reasons of sin and duty- what is it about those notions that act as a cover for something deeper, and what else can ideas like sin and duty act as a cover for. In other words, why do people begin to think about their actions in terms of sin and duty when they are actually performing them for other reasons? What is the psychological relation between sin/duty and those real reasons, known only to us? Thus, we are not only finding the causes of behavior, but also the causes of an agent’s internal reasons. Our discomfort at such explanations might not emerge in the philosophy classroom, but certainly does so in the court of law, because such explanations have a sense of necessity and inevitability about them. How can we praise/blame people if their actions are caused by something besides their own internal reasons, and what makes it much worse, how can we praise/blame after we have also provided an account of how those very internal reasons were caused? The trouble is that a description of an agent’s external reasons (or causes of their behavior) seems to be thicker, and yields a more consistent explanation than their internal reasons do. However, understanding an agent’s external reasons also involves simulating their mind (rather than their deliberations) in particular situations, and similar concerns plague this activity, of how much of our pre-reflective (or cultural) psychological notions are we dragging into the simulation.

These confusing notions are also inherent in our use of the word understandable. When we say that a serial killer’s behavior is understandable, we can mean one of two things: one, we can understand why she committed the murders- maybe she was abused as a child, maybe she was dehydrated, whatever. The other, that she could not help but do what she did, that she was necessitated, and thus, she does not deserve blame, that we should not be mad at her and that we should leave her alone. The confusion is even more troubling when our causal account of her actions does not contain phrases like “She wanted/liked/wished/desired/hoped for X”, i.e., when it lacks phrases indicating her deliberations or her voluntary dispositions. This confusion does not arise because people are stupid, but because there is a genuine confusion in our understanding of intentionality. This confusion is amplified when we discuss a fictional character’s intentions, because we must take into account an author’s intentions too. If I write a story about a man who is abused at his job and then abuses his wife, the point I might be trying to make is that when men hit their wives in the real world, they do so for reasons I am implying- trouble at the job. You might disagree with that and point out how such an explanation is in line with my politics, i.e., you might critique the author’s implied psychological account. Whatever the real reasons behind committing domestic abuse, the answer to the question “For what external reasons did the character hit his wife in the novel?” must be the author’s implied psychological account, i.e., trouble at the job. To answer this question with a theory that is perhaps not as bigoted as the author’s would be to do him a favor by defending him from his own bigoted views.

I mention these issues for a simple reason, not because I have something to say about the role of intentions in a world of causes, but because such interpretations of behavior, which we carry out in our everyday life and not just in the courtroom, presuppose that our subjectivities, the minds-behind-our-eyes, are not so fundamentally different, i.e., the fact that we are (in most cases) satisfied by another person’s interpretation of our behavior leads us to believe that we too can interpret another’s behavior, that there is nothing so fundamentally different about the roots of our minds. If you can make me understand how you understand my behavior, I can understand yours. At this point, someone might object that this is not exactly true for one culture interpreting an entirely different one, that the classifications and associations of one culture could be so very different from the other, that a misinterpretation is inevitable and that this could be disastrous, as has been the case in history. The disaster approaches when we leap from the fact that our minds are not so fundamentally different to the conclusion that we should have a one-size-fits-all way of living in that case, and that we should have such a thing as soon as possible. This is a much milder objection, which warns against a hasty misinterpretation. The hastiness makes us drag in too much of our own minds (our deliberative and psychological notions) while simulating theirs. The usual route taken due to such hastiness is to stress more on the external reasons for their actions, individual and collective, since a foreign culture’s expressed internal reasons for doing what they do seem so unfamiliar that we take them to be unreasonable, like their expressed reasons for performing a particular dance-ritual. Such explanations have a condescending flavor, since the gap they assume between what people think about themselves and who they really are is considerably wide. Ultimately, such hasty and simplistic explanations lead to prejudices like the “noble savage”, or the idea that we can understand and explain a culture in its totality, but the people of that culture just go about their ways, innocently and in ignorant bliss, not caring for total-perspectives, since that very idea is alien to them, either because their culture is intellectually weaker or because their brains are. Thus, in such misinterpretations, our starting assumption, that our minds are more-or-less similar, leads to the conclusion that they are not in fact so, and that one is superior to the other. The more radical objection, though, has to do with the impossibility, and not the difficulty, of simulating their minds truthfully. This impossibility, they say, is not due to a moral deficiency on our part, but simply because people from different cultures are different all the way down. The reader will note the similarities between this starting assumption and the conclusion of our hasty misinterpretations.

Proponents of this radical claim, of course, do not allege that this fundamental difference is due to some biological reason. If an infant from culture X was adopted by people from culture Y, his/her mind could easily be interpreted by people from culture Y, and not by people from culture X. What then accounts for this fundamental difference? It comes about, they say, by the very concepts of a given culture. The way in which a culture names, relates, uses, feels about and explains their world is just one among very many different ways of doing so, and the implication is that all these ways are equally valid, as different languages are. The other claim is that once an individual’s mind is forged by these culture-specific ways of thinking, it is almost impossible not to think in this way; that one is trapped, so to speak, in the prison-house of cultural notions and that all notions are cultural. Sometimes, we have a sense of what it is like to be different, and for others to be different, but this is the most it can come to, and if we forget this warning of difference, we can wreck another culture without intending to do so.

The first objection we may raise against this position is that why are we equating the way a language works with the way in which concepts and categories work? What is the basis for this analogy? All languages, spoken often enough by a wide enough population, accomplish the task of adequately describing the world for them, but why do we, without any justification, assume this absolute potency to be true for a culture’s concepts and categories as well? The usual reply is that we express concepts and categories in language after all, that we think about them, write about them, and teach them to each other in nothing else but language. It does not take an advanced course in epistemology to understand that whatever is expressed in language is not necessarily valid, whatever it is that the word “valid” is supposed to mean here. Secondly, there is something outside of language, ordinary and formal, that our concepts refer to, for the existence of an outside world and our awareness of it presupposes our learning how to use a language (I am aware that this is not as simple and common-sense as I am making it out to be, as will be clear in the next section). Returning to the word “valid”, what exactly do we mean by this? Do we mean that, no matter what their theories and ideas are, they are never wrong? Or that our notion of wrongness is entirely different from theirs, and that it is possible for one among them to disagree with another? If the former is held as true, it seems to me no less condescending than the concept of a “noble savage”, for it is only pitiable consolation that we are offering another culture by not admitting that people within them can be wrong, that they can be dishonest, that they are infallible or that they can doubt. If the latter is held as true, we may infer from this that there are disagreements, not due to cognitive differences, but due to the misunderstanding of shared concepts and categories, between people within a given culture. Without getting too technical, the question we should now is ask is how much must one disagree with another’s use of a concept or category before it seems to us that they are talking about entirely different concepts and categories altogether? If there are indeed such disagreements between people of a same culture, we have enough reason to believe that they can comprehend and argue for/against (to whatever degree) ways of seeing the world that are different from theirs, and its converse, that their ways of seeing the world can be understood by others. Relentless, the cultural relativist might say that there is a box of concepts and categories, unique to every culture, and that people of the same culture can disagree about the validity of those concepts and categories, and that different cultures have mutually exclusive boxes. If someone draws this sophisticated (and might I say with some derision, ad-hoc) a picture, we would expect some answers to questions like: Where does a culture, and thus its notions, begin and end? How did a culture, and thus its box of notions, come to exist in the first place and how does it become obsolete? Does a culture emerge from another, if so, how can we explain the exclusiveness of their notions? And most importantly, how do we explain the growth of knowledge, of an expansion and revision of concepts and categories, within such a culture? Since cultures, and thus their notions, are not born and do not die in a vacuum, it cannot be impossible for one to understand another; it can, however, be very difficult.

The only other option available for someone who is defending the impossibility of interpreting a mind from another culture would be to ignore a common-sense observation, that people understand each other, and to say that each individual mind, even within the same culture, has its own exclusive box of concepts and categories. That we should recognize the uniqueness of our individual boxes, rather than hopelessly and absurdly try to understand each other. I will not refute this argument by two common-sense observations: one, that I just mentioned, and the other, that these relativistic claims themselves seem to be a practice in understanding other minds, a practice they deem impossible. Instead, there is another common-sense observation- thinking, to put it crudely, involves doubting and reviewing one’s box of concepts and categories, and how does one do this if one cannot conceive of anything outside of it? How can a genuine relativist think if she has no notions of objective rightness or wrongness, and considers all truth claims as true-for-someone? What would spur her to doubt a claim she thinks to be “true-for-her” if all the other claims she possesses in her box are also “true-for-her”? Such an individual, with an exclusively unique mind, would not be able to think, and I mean that in the strictest sense of the word and without any derision.

The First Turtle Stands on the Back of a Second

Throughout most of the digression in the previous section, we took some things for granted: truth, falsity, justification, common-sense, and a lot more. Most importantly, our aim was to examine reasonableness from a pure starting point, and we were seemingly lead to think that “It is reasonable to believe in what is true.” is that Archimedean point. But why, why is it reasonable to believe in what is true? I do not want to say that it is reasonable to believe in what is true because it is useful to do so, since I do not want to equate reasonableness with usefulness so simplistically, as will be made clear later. A more interesting answer, in my opinion, is that we cannot help but believe, to a large degree, in what is true, and that a sense of certainty about the world, and I mean this in no fancy-shmancy midlife-crisis sense, presupposes our ability to understand anything at all, and that without this sense, questions about reasonableness are not relevant since the cognitive process of understanding will not exist. We can disagree about how much of our understanding’s objects and units are culled from the outside world, not whether or not they are at all culled from somewhere outside the confines of our mind. For example, is our ability to understand abstract relations such as “A is larger than B” or “X is a part of Y” something we acquire from our observation of the empirical world or is it an innate cognitive apparatus?

That is as pure and as far back as I can push our starting point. I cannot reply to the objection that we still don’t have a pure warrant to equate reasonableness with understanding, and thus with a belief in true statements. Maybe there is a purer one and I would love to read about it, but I don’t think a failure to find a point more Archimedean than this is cause to doubt whether such a thing as “reasonableness” exists in the first place. I do not know how we would recognize this fantastically pure and axiomatic starting point, even if we were fortunate enough to come across it, without which our lives have apparently been doomed to absurdity. These anxieties, about finding the purest starting point, will also surface in our discussions about morality, and now, in our discussion about truth.

Let us begin, then, with the notion that “It is reasonable to believe in what is true.” Our next question should obviously be “What is a true statement?” or more modestly, “How do we know if something is true?” that is, “What is a fact?” I cannot respond to someone who wants to know what the “truth” is and not what a “true statement” is, someone who thinks that “true statements” are just an example or a paradigm of truth, and not exhaustive of the concept of truth itself. Maybe, we cannot talk about truth in an axiomatic sense and neither can we define it, as was the case with reasonableness. Maybe, these paradigms are all we have to think about. At the very outset then, we will recognize statements which are false, statements which are not factual. But there is another set of statements which are not factual but are not false either- we call them values, or value judgments, and we feel that values have nothing to do with matters concerning truth; that they are subjective and don’t correspond, unlike facts, to anything in the outside world. If our subjective values did interfere in our process of knowing about the world, in our search for the facts about the world, then we have good reason to doubt whether those facts are facts at all, or simply concrete illusions of our subjectivity. The cases I am about to present will hopefully show that neither is it true that values have nothing to do with facts, nor is it true that if values have something to do with facts, facts are not true. I will try to show that there are such things as objective values.  

I am sitting in a room with a dog and some furniture; that is certainly true. Or maybe my senses are deceiving me, sending a wrong signal to my brain. Maybe I am hallucinating, and my hallucinations just happen to be so erudite that they are epistemological musings on the truth. My belief in the fact that I am sitting in a room with a dog and some furniture is contingent on a theory which assumes that my senses (usually) do not deceive me. But they do usually deceive me, for almost half of my waking life, in my sleep. Hobbes had a good counter to this:

“And hence it cometh to pass, that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible to distinguish exactly between sense and dreaming. For my part, when I consider, that in dreams, I do not often, nor constantly think of the same persons, places, objects, and actions that I do waking; nor remember so long a train of coherent thoughts, dreaming, as at other times; and because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.”

How do I back my assumption that my senses do not usually deceive me, and that I have a sense of being deceived, maybe retrospectively, whenever they do? There is no way of being certain about this without being tautological. So, I guess I cannot assert that I am in a room with a dog and some furniture. I cannot be certain whether this is true or false.

Let us consider the possibility that everything we think to be real, including ourselves, the sense of our past and the world, is actually some kind of a simulation, a simulation that began a few hours ago (perhaps it is a computer game that Bertrand Russell is playing in his meta-world!). The skepticism that we are presently engaged in was also, for Lord Russell’s entertainment, programmed to occur. Any attempt to counter this skepticism (or is it a realization of the truth, the truth that we are in a simulation?) is also explained away as being programmed by Lord Russell. Thus, we cannot prove this to be impossible without being tautological. So, I guess I cannot assert that I am not in a simulation that began a few hours ago. I cannot be certain whether this is true or false.

I think we should not repress our initial reactions to such ideas, that they seem to be crazy, paradigms of the absurd humor that philosophers enjoy. Brecht’s remarks on Descartes seem apposite:

“This man must live in another time, another world from mine!”

“Presentation of capitalism as a form of existence, that necessitates too much thinking and too many virtues.”

(The last remark is obviously a parody of his ideology’s critical habits.)

If our criterion for a statement to be true is simply that it should be deduced in a formally consistent manner, then I think that either our notions of truth are useless or that we should invent another word for our everyday more intuitive use of the word “truth” (and perhaps write essays on that new word). There ought to be some stricter criteria for a statement to be true, one that eliminates absurd cases like these. I am implying that one of the criteria should be plausibility, and what plausibility exactly entails is a controversial matter. Before we come to some of the controversies among those that are enthusiastic in their support for such a new criteria, let us meet the more familiar objection, that we have once again polluted a concept with our intuitions, this time the Truth – that true statements are statements which correspond with how the world is, and that if there are multiple competing hypotheses, so be it. However absurd some of them seem, we cannot and should not rely on our pre-reflective unreasonable dreadful intuition to pick out those that seem incongruous. A more hopeful (and metaphysical) objection would be to say that there is something formally inconsistent about all those absurd hypotheses, we just can’t seem to see what that inconsistency is. This is different from the claim that those hypotheses are consistent but implausible and so they shouldn’t be called true. I don’t know what to make of “we just can’t seem to see what that inconsistency is”. Some claim that our formal logic and deductive techniques need to be revamped so as to hold such absurd hypotheses inconsistent- I don’t know how this is not the same as saying, albeit in a circuitous manner, that we need a new criterion of plausibility. I think this anxiety exists because plausibility implies some post-truth, relativistic, maniacal world, where there are no facts, only interpretations (and fake news), because there is a sense in which each of us differs in what we think is plausible. The conviction with which we defend our theories about the identity of the killer in whodunits should amplify this anxiety!

However much we are ready to broaden our criteria for truth and narrow the set of true statements, we cannot break the following rules unless we want to render our notion of facts to be meaningless:

1. A fact should not be a statement whose truth value is up for debate very easily.
2. We should not debate it not because there is some majoritarian/authoritarian agreement and consensus about its plausibility and its truth value.
3.  A fact should not be a statement that we are justified in calling false if it does not meet our individual and idiosyncratic standards of plausibility.

The only way we could do this would be to say that the principles of plausibility with which we are concerned are not subjective, or more precisely, they are not principles as idiosyncratic as matters of taste- that they do not differ from person to person. This implies that some notions of plausibility presuppose the cognition of normal human beings, i.e., those criteria or objective values are already there and already used, they are psychologically essential. Some of the objective values we judge theories by are: coherence, functional simplicity, predictability, comprehensiveness, immutability (given a large subset), lack of ad hoc-ness. There are three kinds of disagreements about such notions of plausibility: The first has to do with articulating, identifying and discovering them, and this is difficult because the selective pressures of our own intuitions are not so obvious to us. The second has to do with deciding which principle of plausibility is more applicable in judging a given theory’s reasonableness. The last one has to do with being skeptical of such cognitive machinery altogether, the claim that there is no such thing as “disinterested science”. I will now produce a series of hypotheticals dealing with such disagreements and their relation to reasonableness, rather than theoretically quibble about them, to reduce the boredom content of this essay.

Let us imagine a person from prehistoric times who believed that the earth was flat and that the sun was a hot disc of fire rising from and disappearing into the same sides of the earth-plane every day. Let us assume that this individual had not done any of the following: climbed a tree, set sail, travelled widely, seen a lunar eclipse, known someone who has had another view about the shape of the earth, or anything else that would give him the impression that his earth-plane idea does not fit well with what he sees. Was it reasonable, then, for him to believe that the earth was flat? I think it was reasonable, because he did not have the data to conclude otherwise. I do not obviously think that his beliefs were true, but I am saying that there was no reason why he would have wanted to know better, even if he could have (quite easily) known better. I do not think his lack of awareness about not having enough data and his lack of willingness to find enough data can be brought against him, since he would not have noticed anything peculiar about the earth in his daily life, provided he did not do the things I mentioned, that would make him doubt his picture of the earth-plane. Even if there was a constant turnover of information that the prehistoric people of his community were learning and revising, if cosmological information was not one such branch, I do not think there was any reason why he would suddenly doubt his idea of the earth, since this idea was somewhere in the background of his mind. Thus, it could be reasonable to believe in something that is not true, but only when the (lack of) data available (and other determinants, like a lack of reasons for doubting one’s own common sense) points to a false but plausible conclusion. However, if this prehistoric person believed that the earth is resting on the back of a turtle, and that turtle is in turn resting on another’s back, and so on, this belief would be unreasonable because it is too sketched out not to provoke some attention and examination, if not skepticism, i.e., it cannot rest in the background of his mind. It would be interesting to examine the reasonableness of beliefs like God, the soul and the afterlife, in the past, and perhaps to investigate whether we, today, cannot help but believe in such notions in the backgrounds of our minds in spite of knowing that it is unreasonable to do so. Of course, just because it is unreasonable to do so, it does not mean that this does not satisfy some important psychological needs, and neither am I saying that it is immoral to hold such an unreasonable belief.

Let us now think about a cosmological theory which holds that the earth is at the center of the cosmos. This theory accounts for all the data available and can predict (most) future phenomena, but which undergoes several highly complex changes when new data becomes available, i.e., it is not immutable even after accounting for a fairly large set of data. Let us also assume that the people living at this time possess more plausible theories about other kinds of phenomena, like the human body. They also have a separate intellectual discipline that thinks about theories and knowledge in the abstract and that considers a theory formally similar to the cosmological one to be implausible, but they do not think that the cosmological one is implausible. The difficult question to ask in this context would be whether it was reasonable for people who had access to all these intellectual resources to go on believing in the geocentric model. I say “go on believing” because should they have prompted further investigation into the matter, knowing that the model seems implausible? Let us now add another belief into the mix- one of the reasons they could not confidently doubt this model was because this was the best one which was geocentric, and that the very notion of a heliocentric one would be entirely at odds with claims made by their theological theory. I will not sketch out this hypothetical theological theory’s plausibility; let us simply assume that it is also implausible by their own standards. Is it unreasonable then to continue believing in a statement which is a conclusion of an implausible theory and an assumption of another implausible one? How unreasonable is a belief in something evidently implausible of this kind when one has nothing better, at least as of the present, to believe in? These are questions that also beg a psychological explanation, besides an epistemological one.

If someone were to tell us that they saw a ghost, it would not be reasonable to change the foundations of our belief in a material world or begin to formulate a theory of the afterlife. We would not regard that as evidence to do so and would rather seek to explain it away in some ad-hoc way, by showing that it was a hallucination or a dream. This is the sense in which our criteria of reasonableness affect the way in which we understand the empirical world. Such aberrant cases, though, are not so easily dealt with in disciplines like history. This is because there is no way of measuring how aberrant some new historical information is when compared to our sense of that period or our explanations of social life in that period. Another important reason is that we regard aberrancies to be the very stuff of history, and do not think of the past to simply be a perfect simulation of our speculative historical laws. Why do historical theories have so many exceptions? This might be because we do not have a wide enough subset of similar enough historical situations to formulate laws as certain and plausible as those of the natural sciences, and this in turn might be true because there is no objective sense in which we can talk about a “similar enough” historical situation. This is also because of the fundamental difficulty of interpreting human behavior, of which much was said in the last section.

Let us take the case of a pseudo-science like phrenology, which has false assumptions, is full of ad-hoc explanations, and makes false predictions. One of the questions we ask is, why did people believe in this? A racist worldview, perhaps, was one motive. Let us ask a similar question, this time about something which is in fact a valid theory, like evolutionary theory. Moreover, we do not want to entertain the answer “Because it is true” to questions like “Why did people believe in this?” We, for now, will abandon any knowledge of what is true (or false) and also abandon any notion of disinterested science. Proceeding this way, we might conclude that what motivated some naturalists in the 19^th century to investigate the origins of species was their atheism, and that this is why they believed evolutionary theory was true, in fact, this is why it is true and valid. In fact, phrenology is wrong not because it is pseudo-science; it is a pseudo-science because it was motivated by racism. As attractive as this is, these are examples of gross errors in reasoning. Why then did we abandon any notion of “disinterested science”? Let us assume that we do not believe in objective notions of plausibility, but instead that criteria of plausibility are simply masks for one’s ideology, related to the social, economic and political preferences of the scientist, and it is the dominant ideology, at any given time, which determines the acceptable criteria of plausibility. These notions beg the same questions about cultures, concepts and categories that I had discussed towards the end of the last section – that if thinking, both in its manner and ends, is an activity motivated by preferences, however deep seated they may be, how do these preferences come about in the first place, and how do we understand each other’s preferences which distort our judgement. If prejudice, preference and ideology are used as concepts that explain everything about human life, then they end up explaining nothing.

Diven D Nagpal

Roll Number 12

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