The Power of Reason: How Humans Stand Apart from the Animal Kingdom

The thing that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to use reason. In the lexical sense, reasoning is a form of coherent and logical thinking that permits the creation of conclusions from inferences, deductions and other judgment forms. It is an intelligence presupposing a functioning mind. Humans possess reason because they can form arguments from facts or personal judgment and can use such arguments logically to arrive at a valid or sound conclusion (Reeve, 1995, p.

64). Reason also enables humans to comprehend the relationships between things.

Reason’s strength as a way of knowing depends on its accurate use in drawing relationships among material or abstract entities. Its weakness is its dependency on the external world; higher forms of reasoning can be developed through human interaction. There are basically two methods of reasoning—inductive and deductive methods. While both of them use evidences such as factual premises or arguments based on logical judgment, they differ in their ways of determining a conclusion through logical inferences.

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Inductive reasoning (IR) involves specific premises which, when taken altogether, are the bases for making a general claim.

Deductive reasoning (DR) involves the use of several premises where a claim will be taken from. In IR, the premises do not necessarily have to support one another; they only have to support the general claim. In DR, the premises would have to reinforce one another for the conclusion to be valid. Using IR, the general claim “the car is not in good working condition” needs several independent premises to support it.

These premises may include: the engine lacks several critical parts; the chassis is too weak to support the car; the accelerator pedal is not functioning; the car’s body is rusty, etc.

These premises need to support the general claim “the car is not in good working condition” whether or not they support one another. IR’s strength depends on how well each premise supports the claim. The more premises support the general claim the stronger the claim becomes; the opposite is true. The strength of IR’s general claim can also depend on the strength of the premises regardless of their quantity. Reasoning is essentially used in inductive arguments, especially in assessing the strength of a claim based on its premises.

A person can say that an automobile is not in good working condition if he establishes a logical relationship between the premises and the general claim. He should show that premises A, B, C and so forth independently support his general claim Z. The person may decide to include more premises that support his general claim to make the claim valid or that the opposite of what the claim is not the case. IR’s weakness is that it does not necessarily imply the truthfulness of the claim. Rather, its premises simply support the strength of the general claim instead of establishing its indubitable truth.

While the chassis is too weak to support the weight of the car’s frame or the car’s engine is missing some important parts, for instance, the car may still have other features which can still make it in good working condition. In short, the general claim “the car is not in good working condition” does not necessarily follow from the premises although the premises may actually support the general claim. In the case of IR, “knowing” becomes the attempt to gather as much evidence as possible that will support what human beings presume to know.

To know that attending school is important, for example, is to know the things about going to school which make it indispensable. To know that continuing with our vices is unbeneficial to our health is to know the harms of these vices. In each case of our attempts to know things about our world, people need to know the reasons why these things appear as we know them. In DR, “the car is not in good working condition” would require several premises linked in certain ways. In the example, there should be preceding premises where the general claim will be deduced.

Two premises can be used: first, a car is not in good working condition if the engine is lacking several critical parts, and; second, the Volkswagen Beetle’s engine lacks several critical parts. Through inference from these premises, it can be concluded that the Volkswagen Beetle is not in good working condition. In any deductive argument, the conclusion necessarily follows from its set of premises. There are limitations, however, in using DR to prove a certain claim. Even though the conclusion in a deductive argument necessarily follows from its premises and is, therefore, valid, it does not necessarily mean that it is “sound”.

The premises “all walking sharks eat vegetables” and “all sharks in Galapagos Island are walking sharks” necessarily makes the conclusion “all sharks in Galapagos Island eat vegetables” valid. But is it “sound”? In other words, does it make any sense at all? This is perhaps the most common criticism against DR because for it to be both valid and sound, the premises would also have to be valid and sound. The task of determining the validity of a claim using DR requires verifying the validity of the premises.

Basically, a deductive argument requires reasoning ability, specifically the ability to understand that one thing or event necessarily follows from another like cause and effect. The existence of one thing can cause the existence of another. To know such relationship in things is to manifest the reasoning ability. In the attempt of people to know themselves and the world, DR requires us to recognize the possible connections between things or events and the seemingly endless relationships among the strings of things and events in our lives.

In DR, to know that the global threat of terrorism is a complex phenomenon, for instance, is to know the causes that push radical extremists to commit atrocities towards others at the cost of innocent lives. To know the economic difficulties faced by nations is to primarily know the factors which create the economic problem. To know that you have to preserve and promote the welfare of your family is to know the reasons why these should be done. It isn’t always enough to understand things on face-value alone. Oftentimes, digging deeper makes people realize the causal connections which would have been otherwise left unknown.

Reasoning is inescapable because human beings are basically social beings. People socialize almost everywhere, from their homes to schools and offices. Casual conversation is an example of how people interact with others in the society. In “Reasoning in Conversation,” authors Resnick, Salmon, Zeitz, Wathen and Holowchack (1993) observe that “people try to support the positions they espouse and that they respond sensitively to other participants in a conversation when organizing their arguments (p. 362)”. It isn’t surprising if people use DR in organizing their views about topics of interest in a conversation.

The more valid people’s arguments stand-out in a conversation the more likely it is for them to persuade their listeners. Listeners may believe what they hear and treat it as knowledge. Imagine the scale of conversations happening globally. It is not also surprising if ordinary conversations shape human understanding, which is why DR in conversations plays an important role in acquiring knowledge. Another case of reasoning at work—specifically IR—is when people refer to their previous experiences in filling situational gaps.

According to W. Brian Arthur (1994), “when we cannot fully reason or lack full definition of the problem, we use simple models to fill the gaps in our understanding” (p. 407). In a way, people rely on recurring events in reaffirming their knowledge of a thing or event. They may use the same recurrences in discarding inconsistencies in favor of the more logically valid and sound understanding. The strength of this approach, like most IR examples, is that it makes knowledge open for reinterpretation based on the available evidence.

Recurring events help identify inconsistencies and discard them, helping humans to get to know things better than before. The weakness of relying on recurring events in assessing the strength of our knowledge is that the certainty of what we know is always debatable. The general criticism against reason as a way of knowing is that not all knowledge, especially causal inferences, exclusively depends on reason because humans also discover the relationship between cause and effect through experience (Pierris, 2002, p. 501).

People are able to know that rain causes the ground to become wet because they are able to visually perceive the event. People are able to know that touching a hot kettle can irritate our skin because they may have already experienced the same thing or have seen others react in the same way. Generally, the connections people make about objects and events are parts of their experiences and not solely part of their reason. If a child is left alone to grow in an isolated house away from the society, reason alone can hardly supply the child with knowledge about causal relationships among things or events.

Humans have the faculty of reason which, aided by experience, enable them to know the relationships among things and events. Reasoning may be done inductively or deductively, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. Consciously or not, reasoning is a part of our daily lives especially when we communicate. Reasoning can be valid or invalid, sound or unsound which, either way, can influence others’ beliefs. Without reason, it is impossible to know numerous things and humans will be reduced to organisms who act simply out of instinct.

References

Arthur, W. B. (1994). Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality. The American Economic Review, 84(2), 406-411. Pierris, G. d. (2002). Causation as a Philosophical Relation in Hume. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64(3), 499-545. Reeve, C. D. C. (1995). Practices of Reason: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Resnick, L. B. , Salmon, M. , Zeitz, C. M. , Wathen, S. H. , & Holowchak, M. (1993). Reasoning in Conversation. Cognition and Instruction, 11(3/4), 347-364.