Reason:: Its Power and Limitations, Uses and Abuses in Science, the humanities, Ethics and Religion

1.

Introduction and overview

Reason! We often take it for granted, but whether you look on it as a biological product of evolutionary adaptation, or as some kind of divine gift, the ability to reason, to think rationally, is surely the most extraordinary of human accomplishments. Without it we would have no science, no technology, no language to speak of and no civilisation as we understand it – indeed, we wouldn’t even have any understanding. With it, we have developed a rich, complex and remarkably well ordered civilisation, a massive body of scientific knowledge, and a truly astonishing command of the physical and natural world. Yet, for all its achievements, reason always seems to run out on us just when things get really interesting, leaving us with questions we can’t answer with any degree of certainty. And for all its power, reason is also precarious. The reasoning process relies heavily on the assumptions we put into it, and these in turn rely entirely on our other mental and physical faculties, all of which are themselves limited and none of which has the reliability of reason itself.

One consequence of this interplay between reason and our other faculties is that it is often unclear just how reasonable an argument or a body of argument is. Both as individuals and as a society we are therefore prone to accept as sanctioned by reason claims that may well, on closer analysis, be quite unreasonable. Or to reject, as fatally flawed, arguments that may in fact be quite reasonable. Similarly, it is often unclear in what ways and with what qualifications claims based upon reason can be justified. So we are apt to take as simple statements of fact claims that should be hedged around with qualifications, and were quite possibly intended to be hedged with qualifications when originally made. We confuse knowledge, understanding and belief, and we give credence to mere speculation.

This is a problem even for experts in a particular field, as vested interests take hold, or assumptions and procedures become taken for granted and are exempted from critical scrutiny. It is even more of a problem for the rest of us: for students trying to understand how a subject works, and for the various people dependent in one way or another on its findings. And this has implications not only for our practical, personal decision-making, but also for the public policy decisions we make as a society.

We can’t all be experts at everything. We have to rely a lot of the time on the claims made by experts in different fields, and on their expert assurance that these claims are reasonable. But we also need to have some way of deciding when to trust the experts and what to trust them for. For that, I think, we need to be more critical than we typically are, and the first step towards that is a better informed and more widespread understanding of how reason works in different contexts.

The aim of this book, consequently, is to explain in a straightforward and accessible way the power and limitations of reason: what it can and can’t do for us in different fields of inquiry; how it combines with our other faculties; how and where it runs out on us; and what we might reasonably do when that happens. Among the questions I shall be asking are the following. When can we reasonably trust in the knowledge claims of scientists and social scientists, and when should we be more sceptical? How should we understand the claims of historians and other scholars in the humanities? What contributions can reason make to ethical judgements of what is good or bad, right or wrong? How reasonable are the claims made on behalf of different religious positions (including atheism)?

The exploration of these questions is fascinating in itself, and one way in which this book can be read is as a purely intellectual adventure. But it also leads to much more practical concerns. What are the implications of our answers to these questions for education, research funding and social and economic policy-making more generally? And what can we reasonably ask and expect of the political process, through which decisions on such matters are made?

Later in this chapter I shall sketch out the approach, structure and argument of the book as a whole. First of all, though, let’s unpack a little the claims with which I began.

Reason and its limits

The first thing that strikes us about the faculty of reason today is its sheer power. To appreciate this, just think of some of the things it has enabled us to achieve in the field of science and technology. You don’t even have to think of the modern world: just imagine the reasoning process that must have lain behind the invention and manufacture of spectacles to improve vision, over 700 years ago, or of the mysterious workings of the electric motor, nearly 200 years ago. For something more up-to-date, think of the ubiquitous smartphone, with its massively powerful yet microscopically proportioned computer, high definition camera, interactive touchscreen display, and ability to import and export vast quantities of data through multiple media. The reasoning behind this device is quite amazing. The science, for example, involves predicting with extraordinary accuracy and complete reliability the behaviour of physical materials at a subatomic level, even though we can never observe that behaviour and even though it turns out to be not only quite different from anything we might possibly expect, based on what we can observe, but in some respects quite incomprehensible. The manufacturing processes, again dependent on high-level physics and creating structures measured in thousandths of a millimetre or less, are equally mind-boggling.

Less obvious, but just as remarkable, is the extent to which we rely on reason simply to get along and live our lives, the way in which it shapes almost everything we do and say. We set the alarm in the morning because we need to get up at a certain time, because we need to catch a certain train, because we want to be in work at a given hour. And so on through the day. We do things because, we meet people because, and wherever there’s a ‘because’, implicit or explicit, there’s a reason and a reasoning process. Then there’s language, which pervades everything we do and which is itself a thoroughly rational technology. Whenever we talk, listen, read or write, or even just think using words, we make use of and rely upon the faculty of reason.

The accomplishments of reason are quite astonishing. The scope and pervasiveness of reason are quite astonishing. And they are all the more astonishing because reason, for all of its power, is also remarkably fragile and precarious. There are strict limits to what reason alone can do for us, and outside the narrow realm of logic and mathematics the reasoning process depends heavily on our other mental and physical faculties, all of which are markedly unreliable.

Given a sufficient set of assumptions, reason can take us to conclusions, but it cannot give us the assumptions. Those have to come from elsewhere: from our sensory perceptions, our imagination, our feelings, our intuitions and our prior beliefs (themselves the product of the same mix of inputs), all mediated through language and memory and through layers of subjective interpretation and understanding. These assumptions don’t just come at the beginning of an argument, either. They infiltrate its every step, and they are often unstated, often unconscious. Moreover, if we’re trying to explain a particular phenomenon, either in pursuit of knowledge or in order to respond to it more practically, reason alone can never give us the answer. There will always be an infinite number of theories compatible with any set of evidence, and while reason can help us in choosing between them it can only do so by drawing on our other faculties.

These faculties, however, are notoriously unreliable. Unlike reason, which seems to have something objective about it, they are all highly subjective, and they are all subject to the errors and limitations that are part and parcel of human existence. Memories can be deceptive. Intuitions may have little grounding beyond the shared assumptions of a community. Linguistic communication is at best approximate. Even sensory perceptions entail big intuitive leaps. And feelings and imagination can disrupt reason, as well as assist it.

This combination of the power and ubiquity of reason on the one hand, and the limitations and unreliability of the reasoning process on the other, poses some fascinating and very difficult challenges. In the context of day-to-day practical judgements, we tend to accept that the results of reasoning are provisional. We judge actions and policies according to how reasonable they seem, but we don’t generally expect them to be rationally demonstrable, in any strict sense. We accept that different people in different circumstances and with different values, attitudes, beliefs and desires might reasonably respond in different ways and reach different conclusions, and that in most situations there is no one right answer.

In the context of intellectual discourses, however – in science, the humanities, ethics and even religion – we look for much more than that. We look for something more certain and less subjective, for demonstrations that such and such must be the case, or is almost certainly, or at least is probably the case. To reach this kind of conclusion, to move towards it, or even to find out whether it is feasible, it is not enough just to accept that all reasoning is limited and allow some leeway. We have to make a judgement of some kind as to how significant those limitations are, in the context. We have to decide whether we can reasonably rely upon a process of reasoning, despite its limitations, and the claims to which it leads; and also in what ways we can rely upon them, in what senses we can take the claims to be trustworthy, and in what senses not.

In this context the tendency is to underestimate the limitations of reasoning, and to place more trust in the conclusions reached than they would merit, if subjected to a critical inquiry. (There are people who dismiss reason altogether as a mere social construct, privileging particular political interests and sustaining and sustained by a particular kind of social power, but even they do so on the basis of reasoned arguments, in which they too place more trust than is probably merited.) In general terms, the desire for certainty leads us to find it, whether or not it is there to be found. As individual reasoners, people tend to be convinced, more than they perhaps should be, by their own arguments. Disciplinary communities tend to stand by the claims of their members and the standards of reasoning on which these are based. And outsiders tend to rely on the judgements of experts within a discipline.

Take, for example, the claims of the sciences and social sciences. Every scientific and social scientific community faces different challenges in respect of the kinds of phenomena studied, the kinds of evidence available and the tractability of the subject matter. Biological processes are inherently less predictable than physical ones, and human behaviour is less predictable still. To address their different challenges, the different sciences employ different methodologies, and they are governed by different social practices. The knowledge they generate is differently arrived at, differently justified and of different kinds. They are alike in that they share a common aim: to generate knowledge about the natural world. But the ways in which they go about this are very different.

Given these differences, it seems reasonable to suppose that some of the sciences’ claims may be better grounded and more trustworthy than others, and this thought leads us to some interesting and rather important questions. How much trust should we put in the claims made by different scientific communities? When should we feel confident in following the scientists’ recommendations; when should we treat them with caution; and when should we be downright sceptical? More specifically, how much trust should we put in claims on which we might base important practical decisions: the claims of medical scientists, for example, in respect of the efficacy of drug treatments; of climate change scientists in respect of the environmental conditions for which we need to plan; or of economists and social scientists in respect of the impact of alternative government policies? And if we should conclude that the claims of a particular science are not greatly to be trusted, how much support should we give it in terms of research funding or educational priorities?

In practice, we rarely ask any of these questions. Within academia, people routinely engage critically with claims to knowledge and understanding, but only within the confines and norms of their discipline. They will almost never criticise the claims of another discipline, or use external standards to criticise the claims of their own discipline. This is partly because, in a world of specialisation, they may not have the necessary training, or indeed the interest. And it is partly because they have no incentive. Academics are judged and rewarded entirely according to their standing with their peers. They have nothing to gain by contributing to fields other than their own, and everything to lose by critiquing the norms of their judges.

Some of this applies even to philosophers. Philosophers are experts in critical reasoning, and philosophers of science are in a good position to criticise the standards of reasoning prevalent in the different sciences. But so far as they do this they address their criticisms primarily to other philosophers, and are largely ignored within the sciences themselves. Acutely aware of the limitations of their own reasoning, philosophers of science are also very cautious. They tend to confine themselves to relatively narrow, well-defined problems, and are reluctant to pass judgement, even amongst themselves, on scientific disciplines as a whole. Whereas once they would criticise different scientific fields for their lack of rigorous method, they now tend to expand their conceptions of valid methods to encompass all those that are actually employed, taking it for granted that the achievements claimed are real.

This critical reticence carries over to the way in which students are taught and would-be scientists trained in research methods. They are taught to use the tools of their particular trade, but they are not generally taught what is distinctive about those tools, how they compare with those used elsewhere, their limitations, or the qualifications and provisos that follow from these. If graduate science students are taught the philosophy of science, it is usually in a very general way, to tick boxes as much as anything, and without critical application to their particular discipline.

This critical reticence also carries over, naturally enough, to the way in which we respond to the different sciences as outsiders. The philosophers who might guide us in this are as reluctant to engage in the public realm as they are in the sciences themselves. When they do address the kinds of practical problems that are of relevance and interest to society at large, it is by narrowing the scope of their inquiry to the kinds of issues they are used to, and avoiding the bigger picture. The consequence is that, rather than questioning the rigour and methods underlying scientific claims, we just defer to the expert judgement of the scientists concerned. If a discipline carries the label of a science, and if it looks like a science (it is conducted in university departments, for example) we tend to accept its knowledge claims uncritically, at face value. Unless, of course, we don’t like what they say – because it goes against our religion or our ideology or our financial interests – in which case we may just dismiss them, every bit as uncritically, as ‘biased’.

This way of going about things, of trusting to the various scientific communities and letting them go about their business, evidently works, in a kind of way. We get by. And if there were no practical consequences, if the pursuit of the sciences were just an intellectual exercise, it would arguably be quite reasonable. But as the examples already given show, there are significant consequences. This suggests that we should at least consider taking a rather more critical view, and that is what I shall be doing in this book. Having examined in detail the way reason is made to work and its limitations overcome in the sciences we know can be trusted, exemplified by physics, I shall look at some of the other sciences on which we routinely rely for our practical judgements. In each case I shall ask how they cope with the limitations of reason and whether we have reasonable grounds for trusting in their claims. In some cases I shall conclude that we have, at least within definable limits. In others, such as psychiatry, economics and the quantitative social sciences, I shall conclude that we haven’t. I shall argue, indeed, that our reliance upon their claims, and the status and funding we afford them, are quite unreasonable.

These conclusions are the result of practical reasoning rather than pure logic. They represent judgements as to what it is reasonable, and like all such judgements they are open to debate. But given their implications, that debate is, I shall suggest, one we should be engaging in and not avoiding.

If one tendency is to give too-ready credence to the claims of reason, another is to read too much into the kind of claims made, to treat as objectively valid claims that are highly subjective or to confuse understanding with knowledge. Again, there is a tendency for individual researchers and writers to read too much into their own claims, for disciplines to support this and for outsiders to accept it. Good examples here are the claims of the humanities: history, for example, and the critical studies of art, music and literature.

We are slightly less credulous when it comes to the claims of the humanities than we are in respect of the sciences. We recognise that historians, for example, or literary critics, disagree strongly amongst themselves, and we don’t privilege their claims in the way we do those of scientists and social scientists. But we rarely ask what these claims amount to. The general presumption seems to be that, rather like the sciences, the humanities are about the generation and communication of factual knowledge. The core challenge of history, for example, is taken to be establishing the facts, and the teaching of history in schools is justified on the basis that children need to ‘know’ some of these facts.

Now, history is indeed concerned with establishing the facts, but the facts it seeks to establish are the facts of evidence, equivalent perhaps to the scientist’s individual observations or experimental results. Where it goes beyond that, what it does with the evidence, is an interesting question to which there are several plausible answers, but there is no obvious equivalent in history to the laws and regularities of nature that we take as the core facts of science. Nor are historical explanations comparable to scientific explanations. Indeed, on any reasonable assessment, history is predominantly an interpretive exercise, a construction of meaning and understanding around a framework of fact, and the questions of interest concern how that understanding is constructed, and what part the various actors involved – historical agents, historians and readers – play in it. To put it another way, just what are people doing when they read, write, or seek to learn something from history?

As with the questions concerning the sciences, this is not the kind of question we tend to ask. As consumers of history we typically read it, out of curiosity or for pleasure, as if it were indeed a straightforward matter of establishing the facts. And we debate its value in education or politics in the same terms, asking what our children should know in order to engage as citizens, how much historical facts matter, and what can be learnt from them. Moreover, just as scientists often seem unaware of the limitations of their methods – or quickly learn to set them aside – so too with historians, who seem only too happy to have their interpretations taken for facts; their understanding for knowledge.

In an open society in which historical claims can be and are contested, this may do no great harm. But it opens the way to a world in which history can be re-written, as fact, so as to serve the interests of the state – as it often is under totalitarian regimes. It also puts history and the other humanities at risk. In an affluent society we can perhaps afford to support them, as we do a wide range of sciences, without worrying too much about what they achieve. But with budgets under pressure, we have already seen moves to cut them out from public funding as being economically non-productive, and to do this without engaging critically with their achievements would be dangerously short-sighted. Taking history as a paradigm case, and setting it in the context of reason and its limits, I shall explore what it can and does achieve, and what some of the implications of this are. I shall argue that the fruits of history are necessarily highly subjective, but that they are nevertheless immensely valuable, as part of the way in which we understand the human condition, give meaning to our lives and create a world of human values. To set this in context I shall explore the relationship between history and fiction, and the different ways in which reason and imagination work with each other in the humanities and in the creative arts.

Other areas of inquiry pose other challenges. Consider, for example, the question of ethics. There is widespread agreement that moral values are what hold a community together, and that ethical judgements are not just immensely important, but the most important judgements we make. At the same time, there is widespread disagreement about the basis of such judgements: whether they are rooted in reason, in the emotions, in social conventions, in divine authority, or in some combination of these. And in practice we employ a mixture of arguments based fairly indiscriminately on social or religious norms, feelings and rational judgements.

In this case, the ‘experts’ are themselves philosophers, and there is no shortage of critical engagement within the discipline. There is a rich and vibrant debate about the nature and grounding of ethical judgements, in which the limitations of different lines of reasoning are ruthlessly exposed. But as a society we show little or no interest, either in this foundational debate or in the more practical claims of the discipline. In working out how to respond ethically to some new medical technology, we sometimes consult moral philosophers, among others. But we rarely defer to their judgement in the way that we defer to the judgement of experts in other fields.

In general, we treat ethical judgements as judgements that can be made by ordinary people, without any special expertise, and in so far as we defer to anyone it is to politicians, religious leaders and other authority figures. We don’t even treat ethics as something (like science or history) that should be taught in our schools, other than through the examples of teachers. In what we deem the most important area of life, we prefer to just muddle along. We try to formulate reasonable laws or policies in areas of ethical contention – abortion, say, or assisted dying, or even the regulation of business and finance – but we do so without understanding, or even trying to understand, how reason operates in ethics. We give reasons for one view or another, but we show little interest in engaging critically with each other’s reasons. If two sides disagree on a contentious issue – for example, abortion, or the death penalty – each side simply asserts, without any supporting argument, that its reasons are better than the other’s.

In some way this may not matter. The foundational debate is fascinating, but having reviewed its main features my own conclusion will be that it is ultimately irresolvable; that the differences between competing positions come down to different attitudes to the meaning of life – to religious viewpoints as much as anything. Moreover, when it comes to day-to-day ethical decisions, there is a remarkable degree of social consensus. We do mostly agree on what is right and wrong, without needing philosophical experts to tell us, and the positions on which we agree are by and large the positions the experts would recommend.

There are still concerns, however. First, there are some areas of deep and sometimes growing disagreement, and without a better and more widespread understanding of how ethical reasoning works it will be difficult, if not impossible, to resolve these in any constructive way. Second, the consensus we see depends heavily on the fact that people have been brought up with similar values, embedded in our culture and reinforced by authority figures: parents, teachers and political and church leaders. But in recent years our society has become markedly less homogenous, and people have also become increasingly dismissive of authority, whether social or religious. In this context, I shall argue, we need to take ethical reasoning more seriously. If people are to make their own decisions on questions of right or wrong, or to make their own choices between competing authorities, they need to be taught enough about ethical reasoning to make those decisions responsibly, through engaging in reasoned debate and arriving at reasonable conclusions.

A different set of challenges is posed by religion. Religion and ethics are closely linked, but if ethics is characterised at present by consensus, which obscures the need for critical reasoning, religion is characterised by deep emotional divisions, which make reasoned engagement especially difficult.

Religion is a difficult subject altogether: the most important subject of all to those who believe in it, and a nonsense to those who don’t. As a society we are nowadays tolerant of many views, but we still have to decide where to draw the line between tolerance and indulgence, and this proves very problematic. Quite apart from the persistent eruptions of violence on religious grounds, many religious people, Christians as well as Muslims, feel that they are unfairly discriminated against on the grounds of their faith. Many atheists, meanwhile, feel that Christianity and its teachings, and faith generally, are unfairly privileged.

A reasonable approach to this problem might begin by asking what is meant by – and what kind of claim is involved in – religious belief, and what reason can and can’t do for us in this context. It would assess the reasonableness of different kinds of religious belief. And it would go on to ask how reasonable the various claims made on society by religious groups, on the basis of their beliefs, are. These are the questions I shall be asking in this book, and while the answers I give will be very tentative, I hope at least to demonstrate the importance to society of the questions. And I shall argue that this is in itself worth doing because, once again, they are questions we tend not to ask.

To the extent that we have any public debate on religion it tends to be between atheists who treat God as a purely scientific hypothesis (which rather defeats the point) and Christian apologists who claim that their personal experiences of God’s presence is as good as scientific evidence (as if that was what mattered). They talk across each other, of course: my reasoning against your reasoning, with no attempt to engage. But they also fail completely to connect with the beliefs and non-beliefs of ordinary people and the political challenges these pose. So when politicians come to debate these challenges, they have no option but to fall back on their own beliefs, or on what they perceive as the beliefs of those who might vote for them.

In the public policy realm more generally, where people are arguing for one policy or one course of action over another, there is a marked reluctance to engage critically with the reasoning behind people’s claims. Here, as elsewhere, there is a general commitment to reason. People will generally put forward their own cases in the form of reasoned arguments. But they will demur at critiquing the reasoning of their opponents, or at questioning their own assumptions. They may well insist that their reasons are better than their opponents’ reasons, but they will rarely explain why. They are much more likely, when challenged, to simply restate their case than to go back a step and justify it.

The core function of any political system, and the primary responsibility of the politicians and other actors within such a system, is to create and maintain a stable society in which people can get on with their lives peacefully and constructively. In a contemporary democracy like our own, in which basic security, a functioning state and a certain level of affluence have been achieved, this entails the construction of reasoned compromises with which people can reasonably be expected to go along. In the presence of religious and other differences this seems to me to require more in the way of reasoned engagement than is presently achieved, and that in turn requires a better and more reflective understanding of just what is entailed in religious belief.

Of course, the functioning of a political system is not solely in the hands of the politicians, and in the context of a representative democracy one of the important questions that arises is how far and in what ways we, the public, can reasonably trust those who represent us. At present, it seems, we trust them very little. We assume that they are motivated largely by self-interest, that their promises are empty, and that they are generally incompetent. And seeing things this way, we tend to withdraw from political engagement. Part of the problem here is surely the politicians’ failure to engage in reasoned debate. But part of the problem is also a widespread failure to understand just how the political process works, and what we can and can’t reasonably expect of it. Just as the intellectual discourses I have been discussing are shaped by the twin forces of reason and its limits within their various contexts, so too is the much more practical discourse of politics. I shall therefore finish my analysis of reason and its limits by applying the same kind of critical approach, very briefly, to politics as I have applied to science, the humanities, ethics and religion. The overall thrust of the book is to call for more reason, but always informed by what is reasonable. And it is only by being more reasonable in what we expect from our politicians, I shall suggest, that we can reasonably expect them in turn to be more reasonable.

A reasonable approach

I’m not claiming, in this book, to set the world to rights. My call is always for reasonableness, and it may well be, in some situations, that muddling through or not looking too closely at something is a very reasonable thing to do. It may even be reasonable in some situations to support a scientific community and endorse its knowledge claims while believing them to be ill-founded. To reach a judgement on what is or isn’t reasonable, however, we have to debate the issues. In doing so we have to make use of reason, as far as we can, and in particular to take account of how reason works, and what it can or can’t do for us, in any particular context. This last in particular seems to me to be something that we generally don’t do, and my contribution, which is intended to be a relatively modest one, is to try and open up the debate and make what seem to me to be some reasonable suggestions, which others may contest or build on as they see fit.

To do this I draw mainly on the resources of analytic philosophy. But this is not, and is not intended to be, a rigorous philosophical treatise. For one thing, the scope is too broad. For another, I have nothing new philosophically to say: my contribution has more to do with the application of philosophy. And for another, my topic and my approach to it, while calling for a certain kind of rigour, are also resistant to the kind of rigour most often associated with philosophical research.

To take the first of these points, I shall inevitably touch on many areas of philosophical debate, contentious and otherwise, and to do full justice to them would require at least a book for each chapter. Where I’ve taken a particular stance on an issue I’ve tried to do so explicitly, and used endnotes to locate my position and lead the reader to more comprehensive treatments. For the most part, however, my concern has been to indicate the range of positions that might be thought reasonable rather than to fix on any one.

As regards the second point, my aim is to open up a public debate, or at least to raise awareness of what we don’t debate in public, rather than to engage in a more private, philosophical one. I hope that philosophers will read the book and perhaps draw on it in their teaching and public engagement, but I am primarily writing for that not entirely mythical beast, the educated general public. I have therefore kept my treatment relatively informal, using ordinary language and using words in their everyday sense. I have assumed no prior knowledge of philosophy, or of the various disciplines and discourses I review. And while it matters a lot that my philosophy should be sound, I’m not trying to break any new philosophical ground.

The third point has to do with my focus on what is reasonable, rather than on what is or might be rationally demonstrable. The criterion of reasonableness is often implicit in philosophical writing, but it is rarely explicit and it usually serves to silently frame an argument rather than to shape it. Much of what philosophers do is concerned with reason in a rather strict sense. They don’t just seek to give reasons for or against a position, and balance them off roughly as we might in everyday life. They seek rather to make a rationally compelling case for one position or another, by arguing logically from premise to conclusion. And where arguments are balanced off the presumption is that this is based on some kind of probabilistic estimates; that we opt for a conclusion because it is more likely, in a strictly mathematical sense, than its alternatives.

This kind of argument is clearly important. It is the way we go about demonstrating something with certainty, in mathematics for example. (We now tend to say ‘proving’ it, though historically that referred to an argument that was only ‘probable’, and not certain at all.) And it is the way we go about uncovering the unstated assumptions, leaps of faith and logical errors that bedevil our thinking. But it has its limits and it does not exhaust the realm of reason. It’s also not well suited to debates on public policy. It is the business of philosophers to disagree, and pushing critical reasoning as hard as they can they tend to disagree uncompromisingly. Public policy, in contrast, has to be built on agreement and compromise, and that in turn requires reasonableness, not rational proof.

When we talk of a ‘reasonable’ argument we generally mean one that is not ‘irrational’ in the stricter sense – there are no internal contradictions and no flouting of the evidence – but is not strictly rational either. A reasonable argument is well grounded in reasons that are relevant to the case. We talk of ‘sound’ reasons or ‘good’ reasons. But we cannot define exactly what we mean by ‘sound’ or ‘good’. A reasonable person, by extension, will be able to give sound reasons for her arguments or her actions. But she will also (and just as importantly) be open to counter-arguments, providing that they too are well grounded. And when she takes a stance it may well not be on the grounds of probability. Indeed, the criteria we bring to bear on an issue are very rarely commensurable. We may talk of ‘weighing’ them up, but it’s often like trying to weigh colours against sounds, facts against feelings, or grams against metres. And it is quite possible for two positions to both be quite reasonable, even though they conflict with each other.

Reasonableness is hard to define with any precision, and on the rare occasions that it is invoked explicitly by philosophers they don’t try to define it. Logical reasoning plays its part, but what may be considered reasonable is also, far more obviously than what may be considered more strictly rational, dependent on the social context. What is reasonable to one person, given her knowledge, understanding and beliefs, may be very different from what is reasonable to another person, with different knowledge, understanding and beliefs. When we ask what is reasonable in general terms, independent of the individual, we abstract away some of these individual differences but we also lock in the knowledge, assumptions and beliefs that are shared across a community. And at the end of the day what we consider reasonable is probably as much a question of social consensus as it is of rational analysis.

Reasonableness is, however, the implicit basis of most of our arguments and debates, and indeed of most traditional philosophy. It comes into play not only in practical decision-making, but whenever we find ourselves constructing arguments that combine criteria of strict rationality with criteria of other kinds, either because rationality runs out on us or because we find ourselves in a space between the strictly rational and the irrational. This happens in science, where evidence must be interpreted as well as analysed, and where rational arguments rest, inevitably, on extra-rational premises. It happens in the humanities, where our understanding is interpretive and reason and imagination work in harness; and in the arts, where reason acts in support of the imagination. It happens in ethics, which combines the rational and the emotional; in religion, which comes into play precisely where rationality runs out; and of course in practical politics, the essence of which is reaching reasonable compromises in an often unreasonable world.

In none of these contexts can we progress far without some recourse to reasonableness. But in none can we prove, to the standard of rigour sought by philosophers, that a particular conclusion is reasonable. All we can do is to be as reasonable as possible: lay out our reasoning, accept and try to correct its flaws, recognise our assumptions, and recognise too that there may be other ways of looking at things that are just as reasonable as our own. And that is what I have tried to do here.

Structure and argument

This book is divided into five parts. In the first part I lay the foundations. Chapter 2 sets reason in the context of human existence and surveys the uses we make of it. I introduce the concepts of knowledge, belief, understanding and rational judgement, teasing out some of the different ideas captured in each case and exploring how they are related to reason and to each other. In Chapter 3 I set reason in the context of our other mental faculties and explore how these work together, both generally and in respect of the social discourses that will be the subject of later chapters: science, the humanities, ethics etc. Chapter 4 then explores the various ways in which our powers of reasoning are limited. These include the limitations of memory; the natural physical and mental limitations of our various faculties, especially those associated with sensory perception and language;