An Exposition on Reason

 

What is Reason?

“Reason” can be thought of in terms of two other words often used as synonyms for it: “understanding” and “explanation.” But what will be discussed below as the meaning of reason relies not only on their similarity, but also on their dissimilarity, a sense in which understanding and explanation can be juxtaposed to each other. A philosopher from the French Reformed Protestant tradition named Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) characterized our thinking as passing back and forth on a spectrum between these two poles.

By “understanding” he meant what we might call “getting it” in the way you get a joke: an immediate, intuitive sense of something working, whether it’s a joke working to be the mysterious thing we call “funny,” or a regular word that works just right to capture the essence of a thing (in French, the mot jus, the just word, the exact right word for it), or a brief, concise statement that really “nails” what we’re talking about in a few well-chosen words (this immediacy of insight may be similar to what is meant by the Greek word nous for mind or understanding, but “may be similar” is as far as I will go without much, much, much more investigation).

Explanation, on the other hand, is not such immediate “hits you all at once” perception; it uses formal language and multiple steps or statements using a formally agreed set of rules or definitions, say that a particular joke is funny because it is ironic, and irony has this or that very specific definition into which elements in the joke can be demonstrably fit. In this example of humor, we can see a place where understanding and explanation are directly opposed to each other: the more you have to explain a joke because somebody isn’t getting it, the less funny it becomes.

But in most of our thinking and experiencing the thoughts of others, we fluctuate between the two poles, always somewhere on the spectrum and always in motion from one to the other or back because we need both, and I would say that that act of moving back and forth between them is the core of the human act of reasoning.

I am not sure whether there is a place where Ricoeur specifically identifies “reason” as the interaction between what he calls “understanding” and what he calls “explanation,” a place where he states the act of reasoning as that fluctuating between the two, but it is what I put forward here, whether from him in a place I forgot I read or in my own synthesis  or some combination (either way, I have to credit him: even if this formulation is my own, I would never have arrived at it on my own without him providing the original ideas in just the right way).

 

Poetry and Scientific Language

The linguistic embodiment of understanding at the furthest of that end of the expression spectrum is poetic language Explanation, on the other hand, is best represented by logic and by scientific language, always in prose. Understanding is always first, and a wonderful expression of the idea that poetic language is prior is J. R. R. Tolkien’s comment on his character Tom Bombadil in his Lord of the Rings: Bombadil is an allegory of nature before the Fall, and that is the reason for always speaking in verse form, because poetry is always prior (and probably a more alive union of language and reality). And more scientific studies bear this out: the Hebrew Bible is one of the earliest instances, maybe the earliest, of religious prose narrative; before this, epics or religious narratives such as myths were done in formal verse forms. (And, interestingly, there was a stage in Tolkien’s own development when he went from writing his narratives only in verse to writing them in prose).

Even with non-poetic language, we know how to express what we want before we can access formal rules and categories of language (usage, grammar, syntax): we “get” that a certain set of sounds we form, when somehow aimed at our parent, means, “I want you to give me the cookie,” before we ever learn that “I” is the subject of a sentence or “cookie” is a direct object, or “to” is a preposition, or “want” and “give” are verbs. This “grasp” is of course not the same as the way we “get” a joke or (finally after long endeavor) a fundamental concept, but it is similar insofar as the less explainable (when we don’t know grammar etc.) being prior to the more. But as humans, just as we have the innate ability for understanding, we have a drive toward the scientific explanation that is hard-wired into us. In part (although not usually a conscious part), it helps us appreciate the mystical or mysterious in understanding when we push explanation as far as it can go and find the place left over that we have to leave as understanding.

And of course, the fact that there is still some mystery does not mean that the explanation has entirely failed. Our goal has usually been not to get everything, but simply enough to accomplish a certain task we need to do, which is a much lower threshhold of “working”—not to mention, the one needed for sustenance to keep ourselves able to have the leisure to contemplate such things as understanding and explanation.

I must add that poetry is on the furthest end, and there is much understanding expressed in prose, but usually in a prose that is itself a bit more poetic than work-a-day and scientific communication. I’ll relate here one of my favorites, and maybe my favorite line of the whole Lord of the Rings, at least for summing up my experience. When I read Pippin say “short cuts make long delays,” I thought, “story of my life.”

 

An Example Using Ricoeur

As an example, and to use Ricoeur himself, when speaking with the faculty member who handled my minor-area question for PhD comprehensive exams (I was in the biblical studies “wing” of the theology department, and so one of my four comp questions had to be from one of the other two wings, either historical theology or, as I chose, systematic theology), he asked what Ricoeur’s “threefold mimesis” was about, and I responded, “art imitates life because life first imitates art,” by which I meant that, when we make narratives to communicate ideas or observations about human experience (not only novels and short stories and the like, but some visual artists have told me of constructing visual narratives by how lines lead the eye in a drawing or painting), we do this because we first learn to understand the experiences we call “life” through categories of narrative (we get so emotional at a degree conferral because we think of it as the great final act in a narrative called “grad school,” and a particularly dramatic narrative in the chapter called, “the defense”).

But I didn’t say that explanation part at first, just the quip, and my examiner looked a bit concerned and replied, “ok . . . you need to unpack that a bit.” My quip “got it” in an “understanding” way, but you can’t just write that for the comp question and pass. To somebody who has studied this element in Ricoeur’s thought, somebody who already “gets it” and is secure in knowing they have gotten it, it is (I hope) a nice, succinct, mot jus quip. But when I just toss it out there, sounding like it could be a mot jus but it also might be something I hodge-podged together from a few random statements I found but don’t really understand, they have to check how thoroughly I understand it and whether I can see further ramifications for related areas of life or study. They need me to explain it to be sure I am reasoning well in “getting” what Ricoeur is talking about. And this is also simply part of human nature and the reason for the passing back and forth between the two poles, understanding and explanation, that Ricoeur speaks of. The language that comes from understanding is the most gripping, the most enlivening, and so we are always drawn to it for that. But we are rational creatures and will ever have a drive for explanation, for scientific language . . . and then always a drive to return to the source of lively understanding. We have a sort of dual citizenship, and we love both countries deeply.

 

A Reciprocal Relation

Note again that Ricouer specifically posited that we fluctuate: not simply that we pass from understanding to explanation and that is it, but that we return to understanding and maintain a dynamic relation between the two. And the relation is reciprocal in that it is not simply a matter of explanation being determined by the original understanding and then simply aiding in communicating it securely, and then we tape that box up nice and tidy and go back to understanding for a new, different thing to work on explaining; explanation can also impact the content of understanding of this first thing. If we find that, in working out the explanation, some parts cannot be made to fit no matter how we tweak the rules, and don’t feel just like they are going beyond the rules (into the mysterious, the French je ne sais quoi), but rather working directly against them, then we sometimes work back to the understanding and have to tweak that instead, when we have a moment of “getting” what we got wrong and how we got it wrong.

 

 

Reasoning on the Fly and on the Sly

Immediacy of intuition does not necessarily mean an “understanding” is correct. In most of life, we don’t have the leisure of sitting down and working out a satisfactory explanation for our intuitions, and therefore some of the training in reason is to practice explanations as a way to habituate our intuition along the right lines so that we can rely on it more safely in “life in motion,” so to speak, where we don’t have the luxury of finely working out definitions and rules (again, below, there will be examples from the field of logic, where the “explanation” is very formal and we can see the contrast more clearly).

And it must be added that sometimes we will never be able to really pin out the explanations consciously, even for something that is not je ne sais quoi mysterious: some intuitions can be very secure and yet the connections that would be involved in their explanations remain ever grasped by us only on a level below conscious reasoning (my father said he used to solve math proofs in his sleep: having been busting his head on them while awake, he decided to call it a night and go to bed, and woke up with the answer . . . of course, in that case, an unconscious facility for understanding did feed back into a conscious explanation when he was able to write the proof). And that is not a reason not to bother practicing explanations, but all the more reason to do so in hopes that the practice of form trains also the unconscious intuition (we can’t necessarily verify it worked, but it’s worth a shot and better than not). When you start an instrument as a child, you play scale after scale after scale, and then you can flow and improvise and work on touch (and some who don’t learn some instruments correctly as far as form goes, have a lot of work unlearning the wrong and relearning the right on a level of bodily flow in playing).  Of course, you always have those prodigies who have the touch the first time they pick up the instrument.

 

Reason and Truth

Reason must also be distinguished from “truth,” although truth must always be reasonable . . . it simply must be more than reasonable. The easiest way to look at this is through a particular formal distinction made in logic and the connected distinction made in linguistics. (Additionally, the field of logic will, below, provide a helpful—hopefully).  In logic, an argument is “valid” if the conclusions can be logically demonstrated from the givens using the established rules (in the case of symbolic logic, the nineteen rules of inference and the twentieth rule of “conditional proof”). But the argument is “sound” only if, in addition to justifying the conclusions, the givens also accurately represent reality. In linguistics, the traditional distinction of the same kind made by Gottlob Frege is between “sense” and “reference.” Sense is simply whether you can make sense of a predication. If I say that there is a blue car parked at the end of the street, you know what a car is, and what it means for it to be blue (the literal visual hue, not metaphorically sad), and what it means for a car to be parked, and what a street is, including its end, and how the word “at” functions in those relations, and so you can make sense of what I have said; you know what I mean when I say it. But as to whether there actually is a blue car parked at the end of the street, that’s a matter of reference, or the “referential value” of the predication. In order to have referential value, a statement must first make sense (in the linguistic sense of the word “sense”), and truth requires both. This is true in an expanded way even when people use “makes sense” to mean “seems true.” It’s just that, here, the elements being coordinated together for “sense” are not simply parts of speech and definitions of terms, but meanings of visual, aural, etc. perceptions that are used as evidence.

(In a law setting, well-practiced lawyers say that, when entertaining a motion to dismiss on certain grounds, the first step is a hearing on the law, on whether the claim, if proven, would even justify the result of dismissal, and then if that is satisfied, move on to an evidentiary hearing to find whether the claim of fact holds up. The lawyer Michael Popok co-hosts a podcast in which he criticized Judge Scott McAfee in the Georgia state-court system for exactly this blunder in the criminal RICO prosecution of former U.S. president Donald Trump and alleged co-conspirators, when the defense lawyers argued that a romantic relationship between the D.A. and one of her team constituted grounds for dismissing the case: McAfee held the evidentiary hearing before the hearing on the law. The practice of law is itself greatly tied to logic, as a unique deployment of logical principles, which is why a good portion of the LSAT consists of logical problems and puzzles, or a least used to when a professor I had always began his course in general logic with a couple sessions of walking through some of the LSAT from a couple years prior).

 

Some Examples from Logic

Stepping back out from the issue of referential value versus sense or soundness versus validity, we can look at two specific examples in formal logic as two examples for the basic distinction between understanding and explanation. Logic is built around the distinction between the universal and the particular, as can be seen in the first example. A logical syllogism always has three parts at its core: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion drawn from the two premises. And usually the major premise is a universal statement, the minor premise is a particular statement, and the conclusion is a particular statement. The classical, textbook example from ages and ages past is:

 

(1) All humans are mortal;

(2) Socrates is a human;

(3) Thus Socrates is mortal.

“Understanding” is that immediate sense you have in reading this right now that “yeah, that makes sense.” The explanation goes something like this (and, quite frankly, much more dryly): when you have two predications and one is universal (all humans are mortal) and the other particular (Socrates, the particular man, is the subject of the predicate “is human”), and they have a shared term (“human” is in both) and that shared term is the subject of the universal predication (“all humans” is the subject and “are mortal” is the predicate) and the predicate of the particular statement (“is human” is the predicate for the subject “Socrates”), then you can logically make the predicate of the universal statement (“mortal”) to be the predicate of the subject in the particular statement (Socrates): hence, “Socrates is mortal.”

Reasoning is the process of having an intuition that the syllogism is valid but then picking it apart by an accepted rule (if you have a term that is the subject of a universal statement and the predicate of a particular statement, you can apply the predicate of the universal to the subject of the particular) to see if it works. And if it works but with some twist, we go back to the intuitive part and try to form it so that that twist naturally comes to mind when encountering this or related or similar material, that it is in the “muscle memory” of the intellect, so to speak.

The second example is something borne out particularly well using symbolic logic (in which letters as variables fill in for predications). If you discover a clear contradiction in the givens/premises (meaning two predications that must have opposite truth values—if one is true, the other must be false—as opposed to a contrary, in which they cannot both be true but they can both be false, or a subcontrary, in which they cannot both be false but can both be true), then you can prove the desired conclusion no matter what it is. The “understanding” of this is that, in a world where a contradiction can be true, anything can be true. But as with my quip for my PhD comp question, if you write just that on the test, you get that one wrong. The “explanation,” using the nineteen rules of inference, goes:

 

(1) P (given or justified already in proof);

(2) not-P (given or justified already in proof);

(3) P or Q (Q=anything at all; justification: line 1 and rule of addition);

[The rule of addition relies on a weak “or,” meaning simply that at least one of the two must be true, but it could be that both are; the strong  “or” would mean that if one is true, the other must be false.]

(4) thus Q (lns. 2, 3 and rule of disjunctive syllogism [given “P or Q” and given “not-P,” then “Q”]).

 

The understanding version seems true to us intuitively; the explanation version can help us verify that and can also help us see further implications on a universal level, turning that first intuition into the basis for further understandings. I propose that the act of human reasoning it that dynamic relationship between understanding and explanation.