The supposed war between reason and the emotions

So much of our thinking seems to be defined by simplistic and misleading slogans or caricatures. Consider the way we talk about "Reason versus Emotions." The thinking seems to be that

• These "things" are distinct (two entities)
• One excludes or corrodes the other (they are enemies; they are opposites)
• Reason is superior to emotion (In the healthy mind/soul, the reason rules the emotions—Plato, Kant)

Sometimes, we encounter a kind of rebel position:

• "The heart has its reasons, of which the mind knows nothing." —Pascal

We run with some of these ideas, but should we?

OVERWHELMING EMOTION

The term “emotionalism” is sometimes used to refer to a state in which emotions—anger, fear, joy, etc.—are so strong that reason is impaired. Obviously, this sort of thing does happen. But just what may we conclude from this phenomenon? Certainly none of the ideas above.

Observe that, in recognizing the phenomenon thus understood, we seem to be thinking that emotions are not intrinsically corrosive of reason, for otherwise we would not specify cases in which emotions are “so strong.”

This matches the common sense observation that people often feel emotions while reasoning perfectly well. If I feel joy when I reunite with my long-absent cat, there is no reason to suppose that my reason is impaired. Heck, it could be optimal.

I sometimes watch those military aircraft shows on TV. Actually, I love 'em. There, I encounter depictions of fighter pilots in highly stressful circumstances—dogfights and “furballs.” These pilots’ survival depends on their employing rational faculties well. Do we think that these pilots are necessarily rationally impaired because of their stress and fear?

Or is it that, somehow, they block out or thwart their emotions in order to function well and thus survive? But they give every indication of not doing that, and, typically, they acknowledge their fear.

In what sense then can emotions be thought of as “opposed to” reason?

UNDERSTANDING EVENTS

Sometimes, our reason—or, more broadly, our understanding—requires, or essentially includes, emotions. If college kid Ivy works on a research paper about the Holocaust, learning for the first time that millions of people, including women and children, were rounded up, horribly abused, and then killed, we expect her to be horrified.

Being horrified, even if it is the sort of “horror” that we might experience as we hover quietly above a book in a library, is an emotional state.

Imagine that Ivy is in no sense horrified. She is reading about and thinking about these events, but she feels no differently than she might feel while thinking about, say, lint. Here, we would, I think, be inclined to say that, since she has no feelings about these events, she obviously does not understand them.

Among the states of incapacitation that we talk about are states of numbness and the absence of emotions. Here, as in so many cases, “being rational” involves, among other things, the presence of feelings and emotions, not their absence. Emotions aren’t opposed to reason; emotions are a part of being rational.


THE LOGICAL MR. SPOCK

Imagine an episode of Star Trek in which Captain James T. Kirk has been captured by the Romulans and it is now up to Mr. Spock, the supposedly “unemotional” half-Vulcan second-in-command, to save Jim from a fate worse than death. Suppose that Spock does his very best to command the ship and its crew and, in the end, he saves Kirk. Later, Spock explains to Dr. McCoy that his efforts on behalf of Kirk were “logical.”

But it is difficult, I think, to picture Spock’s diligence in saving Kirk without attributing to Spock some element of feeling or emotion, at least in a dispositional sense. I mean, if Spock doesn't give a damn about Kirk—and doesn't give a damn about the “Prime Directive” and the Federation either—then in what sense is it “logical” for him to strive and strain to save Captain Kirk? In that case, it appears to be illogical.

YOU'RE JUST BEING EMOTIONAL

Often, foes of abortion or animal exploitation are accused of being “emotional” rather than logical. Most of the time, I think, the charge is confused. Surely the accusers cannot be thinking that the anti-abortionists fail to be logical because they feel emotions, for emotions—e.g., concern for the welfare of poor pregnant women and unwanted children—are as essential to the pro-choice position as they are to the pro-life position. In general, having strong concerns is intrinsically a matter of emotions and feelings, and we certainly do not want to say that having concerns is incompatible with being rational or using reason.

It is easy to anthropomorphize—that is, to erroneously project the capacities and aspects of our own mental life onto beings who are not thus capable. We do that with animals when we suppose that they are indignant or treacherous. We sometimes do it with infants and with fetuses. Now, if Auntie A supposes that an 8-week old fetus is mentally very much like an infant, and, on that assumption, she is utterly horrified by film of an abortion of an 8-week old fetus, then she is making a mistake. But her mistake has nothing to do with her emotions. For if she felt the same emotions while observing similar violence done to an infant, we would regard her feelings as appropriate and healthy. The problem here is not that her emotions impair reason; rather, the problem is that she misconstrues the facts, for an 8-week old fetus does not have a mental life and thus is not at all like an infant. Misconstruing the facts is not about emotions.

SURPRISING EMPIRICAL TESTIMONY

Have you read Antonio R. Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error? Damasio is not a philosopher, but rather a neurologist at the U of Iowa. He researches brain functions. In Descartes’ Error, working largely from his research, he argues that emotions play a central role in human reasoning. According to Damasio, people who, congenitally or owing to injury or disease, cannot feel emotions also cannot make good decisions.


WORDS WITH, OR WITHOUT, EMOTIONAL MEANING

People are sometimes accused of using “emotional” language as though that were illogical or fallacious. Here's a concrete case.

Suppose that Auntie A insists on describing an 8-week fetus as a “baby.” Now she’d never get away with that among a group of pro-choicers, for pro-choicers would immediately ask her to justify her tacit assumption that 8-week old fetuses are similar to or equivalent to infants. It would quickly become clear that Auntie A is, as we say in logic, “begging the question,” i.e., she is assuming the truth of the very proposition that she needs to establish—namely, that a fetus is the sort of being who ought to be regarded in the same way that we regard a baby. She cannot simply assume the proposition. She must argue for it.

Just who would be led astray by the “tactic” (if that is what it is) of calling a fetus a “baby”? I find it hard to picture this process. But I guess that I can just barely imagine someone, Mr. B, listening to Auntie A and being persuaded of her pro-life position in part because he fails to notice the question-begging in Auntie A’s rhetoric. Mr. B's mistake doesn’t strike me as about his emotions. Someone who falls into Auntie A's trap strikes me as rationally untrained and unsophisticated, but they don't strike me as having defective emotions or as applying emotions "incorrectly."

Just what would it be to have a “wrong” or “illogical” emotion anyway? Laughing at a rock or a bean, I guess. Feeling joy at the sight of a wall crack.

Fallacy!

And, again, simply having emotions is not in itself a fallacy. Far from it.

Sometimes, people use rhetoric that obscures the appropriateness of strong emotions. If Jack Ripper teaches his recruits about the My Lai “incident,” he might manage to leave the impression that it was not a violent event in which many women, children, old people, and animals were slaughtered. It is much more “logical,” it seems to me—it is more accurate and honest—to refer to the event as a massacre, something that by its very nature is violent and dreadful.

Sometimes, being logical is a matter of bringing emotions into play.

ERRONEOUS WAR

I often find students who are hostile to reason, or hostile to the advocates of reason, exactly because they suppose, as we are endlessly encouraged to do, that reason and emotions are like oil and water or are distinct and opposite. Because these students rightly sense that there is nothing wrong with emotions, that, indeed, there is something very important about emotions, and given that reason and emotions are "opposite," they naturally become the enemy of reason.

But their assumption that reason and emotions are separate things and that they are opposed to each other is unwarranted, and it is a mistake. And so, therefore, is the war they seem to feel they must wage against reason.
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Acting just like a vicious human (some notes on Free Will)

A peculiarity of our language—or of our thinking—is that, when we find someone’s behavior to be especially heinous, we often call him or her an animal. “He’s no more than an animal,” we’ll say. Or he’s a “beast” or a “brute”—more words meaning “animal.”

Usually, the “beastly” behavior we are condemning cannot be found among animals—i.e., among nonhuman animals, for, obviously, humans are animals too. Isn’t it clear that human beings do terrible things that are never done by animals? Think of torture, genocide, parking one's car on the lawn.

How come we don’t accuse Dick Cheney of behaving like some kind of goddam human?

Another peculiarity is our tendency to speak of “vicious” animal attacks. Well, the one thing that an animal attack cannot be is vicious. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “vicious” as “having the nature or quality of vice or immorality….” The word “vicious,” of course, comes from the word “vice.”

Consider the case of a cougar attacking a hiker. In the cougar’s mind, the hiker invaded her territory. So she attacked the invader. Was the cougar behaving immorally? Did the cougar exhibit vice?

Of course not. She did not do these things because cougars are not (as we say in philosophy) moral agents. That is, they are not beings who are capable of moral or immoral behavior. For one thing, they have no understanding of right and wrong.

Human infants are not moral agents either. They matter morally—it would be murder to kill an infant. But they are not moral agents, for they are incapable of right or wrong actions.

I know a man who routinely attributes moral agency to nonhuman animals. For thirty years, he has carried on a war with gophers on his land. He hates the little buggers. Sometimes, he’ll explain how a gopher could have dug in direction A, but instead he dug in direction B, evidently for the sole purpose of antagonizing him. He oozes contempt for these gophers. Do you know such people?

Sometimes I kid him. I say, "Well, those gophers were here before you were. If an all-out war breaks out here, I'm sorry, but I've gotta take the gophers' side."

There seem to be many TV programs devoted to describing animal attacks on humans. Invariably, the victim of the attack will at some point explain, “I don’t blame the bear (or weasel or jackalope). She was just protecting her young.”

But what if the bear was just hungry? I guess they’d condemn the bear in that case. “Goddam bear.”

But to do so is to engage in anthropomorphism, “the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object” (according to my Mac’s dictionary). Bears know no morality. They are not the kinds of beings who can be immoral or blameworthy. If a bear eats someone because she’s hungry, she isn’t vicious. She’s just doing what bears do because they’re built that way.

I recall an episode of a TV legal drama in which a gentle man becomes violent and starts to hurt people. He’s arrested. Eventually, doctors discover that he has a brain tumor that has somehow altered his personality and caused him to be violent and erratic. I thought, “yes, I get it. This tumor changed the guy into someone who could not help having uncontrollable violent impulses.” And so he was violent.

I figured, “great, they’ll just remove the tumor and send him home.” But no. In this drama, the case became a real puzzler. People debated the man’s responsibility for his attacks. In the end, a judge decided to convict the man of his crimes and send him to prison. As I recall, she said something like, “if we don’t hold this man responsible for his actions, how can we hold others responsible for theirs?”

To me, this just seems confused. In the story, we were led to believe that anyone who had such a tumor would be caused to do what this man did. Suppose that’s true. Then it wasn’t the man but the tumor that accounted for his violent behavior. Indeed, in the story, the man had a long history of being moral and nonviolent. So, if we need to subtract the tumor from the man, we can do that, and when we do, we have a man, a moral agent, who is not violent or immoral.

It seems to me that many people refuse to reflect about when people are or are not responsible for their actions. Often, they seem to gravitate to a very simple picture: you have a man and you have his action. He is responsible for his action. End of story.

I’m amazed that such people don’t regard gophers and bears and infants in the same light.

Maybe they do. Good Lord.

"Goddam brat!"

• • • •

I have never understood the concept of free will. I want to understand it. I want to believe in it. But what sort of thing is it supposed to be?

Among those who believe that we humans are "free agents" and that we possess a will that is free, some will insist that their conscious decisions are the occasion and the phenomena of freedom.

If so, then a recent study should give them something to fret about. Several months ago, the journal Nature Neuroscience published a German study that involved people performing actions while hooked up to some kind of MRI. The study seems to show that, several seconds before subjects make a conscious decision, the "brain" has already made one.

From the Boston Globe (Free will? Not as much as you think):

"It seems that your brain starts to trigger your decision before you make up your mind," said the study's lead author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute ... in Germany. "We can't rule out free will, but I think it's very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made?"
...
Employing both functional magnetic resonance imaging and pattern recognition statistical techniques, the researchers were able to predict which button people would choose before they made their conscious decisions—as much as 10 seconds early, "an eternity," Haynes said.

Haynes believes that delay suggests the absence of free will as most people define it.

The physical brain apparently starts shaping the decision long before the conscious mind does. He speculated that the frontopolar cortex encodes the decision, while a section of the parietal cortex stores it and coordinates the decision's timing.

The study does not settle the issue of whether there is free will. But, for those who suppose that their conscious decisions are the captain of their ship, things aren't looking very good right now.

• • • •

If Haynes is right, then conscious decisions are epiphenomena—that is, each is "a secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process" (as my Mac dictionary would have it).

Think of a futuristic robot (Ralph) that seems and behaves exactly like a human being. Ralph is a deterministic mechanism—that is, like my Mac (more or less), Ralph is a system in which nothing happens by chance; everything is programed and caused.

Ralph is not, however, sentient (i.e., he has no mental life).

Suppose that a clever engineer finds a way to modify Ralph so that he does have a mental life. Thus, now, he no longer only seems to think and feel; he really does think and feel.

But Ralph's new feature amounts to a series of epiphenomena. That is, the thoughts and feelings and decisions of Ralph's "mind" do not cause anything. In fact, the older mechanism within Ralph causes his thoughts. And so Ralph imagines that his decision to lift his hand caused him to lift his hand, when, in fact, his mechanism caused both the lifting of his hand and his "decision" to do so.

Does Ralph have a free will?

Blade Runner: "I've seen things"


Aristotle argued that we are responsible for our character because our character forms through habit. A young person who continually "does as the courageous person does" will grow accustomed to behaving in that way; he will develop a firm disposition to stand his ground. But it works for vice, too. A young person who is allowed to (and allows himself to) run away whenever something fearful arises will form a disposition to run away. His cowardice—his disposition to run away—will be of his own making.

As far as it goes, this makes a great deal of sense and is, I think, insightful.

For those who are inclined to press the question of how it is that a person is responsible for his actions, this account promises some answers. If John runs away like a coward, we can attribute that to his cowardice (his disposition to run away), and since he chose the actions that, repeatedly performed (owing to his choices), led to the formation of that disposition, he is responsible for his cowardice.

But this does seem to raise a puzzle. We have asked, why is John responsible for his cowardice? The answer: he chose the actions that led to his cowardly character.

OK. But what is the nature of the "self"—the John—who chose those actions that are now at the bottom of our explanatory scheme? We cannot refer to character, since we've already appealed to these actions to explain character.

So just what is this self then? Isn't it something that reveals character by its choices (of actions)? How could it be otherwise? But now we're just going in circles, for we are appealing to character to explain actions that explain character.

Suppose that one ends one's efforts to explain moral responsibility there. If so, then I suppose that one must regards the "self" that makes the choices (that develop the character that issue in actions for which one is responsible) as a kind of "character" that just comes into being: a given, a brute fact. The self is not responsible for the "character" of this original self. It just is what it is.

Does it make sense to view responsibility in this stark way? If someone is born bad, does it make sense to hold him responsible for being bad? (Surely not, unless we have an account of how this entity that is born is the way it is because of some process that occurred previously [now we're getting metaphysical!] that includes some way that the self is responsible for how he ends up being. We seem to be in an infinite regress here.)

We do seem to think in that stark way sometimes. We are told that child molesters are almost always the product of child molestation. When I hear this, a part of me thinks: it is not at all clear to me that we can hold someone responsible for their pedophilia if that aspect of their personality is virtually guaranteed by their having been molested as a child.

And yet we seem not in the slightest bit reserved about condemning and loathing pedophiles.

Same goes for sociopaths. If they are born that way (as we seem to be told), how are they responsible for their sociopathic ways? How does this work exactly?

And if we are willing to hold Dexter responsible for just arriving in this world a sociopath, why not hold animals responsible for what they are and what they do? And infants?

(Compare with G. Strawson: Living without ultimate moral responsibility.)
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Human folly is so very entertaining

After many years as a teacher of “critical thinking” (I hate that phrase, but what are you gonna do?), if one thing is clear to me, it is that it’s easy to make mistakes when judging about causation, i.e., X causing Y.

Most people grossly underestimate these difficulties.

Not long ago, I spoke with a highly intelligent colleague (known for being sharp) who explained to me that he takes his horses to a chiropractor. I gave him a look. He said, “No, really. I’ve taken horses to this guy and the adjustments really work.”

If there were a course called “Causation 101,” among its targets would be the old “it works for me” (or “it works for Trigger”) rationale. No doubt it would be discussed along with the famous “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, thus because of this) fallacy.

Just because A happens (Trigger gets tweaked), then B happens (Trigger eats more hay), doesn’t mean that A caused B. Right?

Yeah, but there’s a pattern. A then B, A then B. What about that!

I won’t launch into the whole lecture. I just want to make the point that, unless you study the fallacies concerning causation carefully, you’re very liable to commit them.

The truth is that the history of humanity is a history of people coming to believe things—ideas about causation included—on poor or nonexistent grounds. Example: two hundred years ago, doctors purged and bled patients. In fact, they were killing them. But this didn’t lead to much skepticism about purging and bleeding.

History (including the present) is littered with examples of poor causal thinking and unfortunate and erroneous causal believing.

But here’s the kicker. It’s not as though someone has gone through society with some kind of anti-virus program, spotting and fixing all the causal goof-ups. We are tempted, I think, to view society as a place in which, more or less, reason rules, and glaring folly has largely been identified and discarded. But nothing could be further from the truth. I often tell my students, “Go anywhere and point in any direction. It would be amazing if you were not to find yourself pointing at some instance of routine foolishness.”

In a way, journalism amazes me by how bland it usually is. It seems to me that one need only enter some random building and one will find something absurd or alarming.

Imagine that we point at the world of sports and athleticism. There, one hears endlessly about the importance of “stretching.” We listen to this and think, “Guess so. They’re the experts.”

But if people can find a way to puke and bleed themselves to death while supposing they’re on the road to health, then they sure as hell are capable of believing just about anything about stretching. I mean, it’s not as though anybody’s really studied the matter.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Filip Kwiatkowski asks Is Stretching All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

Kwiatkowski first notes that trainers (et al.) are very passionate about the issue of stretching. That is, they are very sure that stretching is important—something you'd better get right.

But, in fact, advice about stretching is remarkably different around the world: “In Norway, people stretched after they exercised; in Australia, they stretched before exercise.” Further, the nature and purpose of stretching differs. In some parts of the world, athletes stretch to prevent soreness, but that’s not why people stretch in this country.

But it sure is important.

Something doesn’t add up here. If stretching is so all-fired important, how come people don’t agree on when to stretch and how to stretch and why to stretch? Tell me that!

Well, two large studies have been launched to try to get to the bottom of this. You can read about them in the Times.

I have my doubts about these studies. I don’t think this “stretching” business will get cleared up right away—not based only on two studies, even if they are large (they are). One hopes that further studies will be done and results compared. In time, the truth will emerge.

In the meantime, think of all the fallacies that will be committed, all the conclusions jumped to, all the misconceptions and passions generated.

Humanity is so very entertaining.

Gotta go. I need to take a quick walk. It's good for the digestion. Everybody knows that.
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Without data, we only have a bloke*

"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants." —Chuckles the Clown (Mary Tyler More Show)

Now, lots of folks in academia claim to teach "argumentation"—how to argue. But they aren't always teaching the same things.

It has long struck me as odd that, while philosophers teach their students that facts about an arguer are irrelevant (this is the essence of their teachings re the "ad hominem" fallacy), writing and speech instructors often seem to teach the opposite, for they make a great point of the importance, for the writer or speaker (the arguer), of presenting himself in a certain way: as reasonable, knowledgeable, etc.

The explanation of this difference, of course, concerns the different purposes these people have. The philosopher/logician seeks the truth and thus teaches students how to seek the truth. Hence, he focuses on evidence and reasons—what writing instructors call "logos" or the "logical appeal." He is not concerned with "pathos" or "ethos"—i.e., the emotional appeal or the appeal that derives from how the writer presents himself.

Writing instructors, however, are more about effectiveness (or persuasion) than truth, and so, for them, "logic" is just one tool among several. For instance, if you want to convince your readers of something—say, that John McCain is too addled to be President—then, assuming they aren't very logical (usually a safe assumption), you'd be a fool to offer mere logic. Reasons and evidence? Most audiences will become bored with that; they'll walk away. Better get out the blooper reel. (See Why we need rhetoric.)

Philosophers, as philosophers, are happy to have people walk away. They want to know the truth, and knowing the truth has nothing to do with having lots of eager listeners or readers. (Indeed, folks who seek the truth invariably become very nervous when their ideas become attractive to others.)

Roughly speaking, writing instructors are unhappy when the audience (or the "reasonable" among the audience) walks away. And so they spend a good deal of time talking about the importance of presenting yourself properly, i.e., effectively. (Ironically, writing and speech instructors can trace their body of theory to the writings of a philosopher/logician, but one who held audiences in low esteem. See Aristotle's rhetoric.)

Um, but if your readers buy that, they're committing a fallacy, right?

—Oh, absolutely. Great. Now show us Obama Girl!

A recent column by Ben Oldacre (in the Guardian: Testing the plausibility effect) concerns what happens when audiences focus on how a speaker presents himself (ethos) without focussing on his evidence and reasons (logos). He notes the case of a Dr. Somebody, an impressive government advisor, who claimed to have done a study that showed that a recent spate of suicides all lived close to a mobile home mast. After a few phone calls, Oldacre determined that Somebody wasn’t a doctor, wasn’t a government advisor, and he had lost his data:

Without data, we have only a bloke. Week in, week out, we see apparently scientific claims being made in the newspapers with great confidence, as if they were based on evidence, when in reality they are based on nothing more than authority, and often from one man. This is because science is communicated to the public by journalists, who sometimes have no understanding of what it means for there to be evidence for an assertion. They are impressed by enthusiasm, long words, by a PhD, a white coat, or a medical qualification. [My emphasis.]

Oldacre recalls an experiment performed in the early 70s. Researchers hired a man to play the role of an authority “on the application of mathematics to human behaviour.” In fact, the man knew nothing about the subject. They gave him an impressive fake CV. They had him give a presentation at an academic conference on medical education. His lecture and Q&A was filled with “double talk, jargon, dubious neologisms, non sequiturs, and mutually contradictory statements.”

The lecture was a hit. They tried the charade several times. They always got the same result.

My advice? Let's start teaching students what is relevant and what is not. We're drowning in illogic.

* * * * *

[Thomas Hobbes] maintains that the establishment of ethos is an irrelevance not merely in the natural sciences…but in the moral sciences as well. His translation of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric accordingly omits the entire section in which Aristotle speaks of the crucial importance of taking steps to make a good impression on one’s audience.

—From Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Quentin Skinner

“A second type of … argument is the speaker’s character, not only as established by his reputation, but also as conveyed in the speech itself. Most orators agree that one’s character is the most potent weapon in one’s rhetorical arsenal.”

—From A Brief Summary of Classical Rhetoric, made available to students at Harvard

*This post is a slightly edited version of something I wrote recently for Dissent the Blog (Without data.)

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