Feeling and believing

Philosophers are the designated defenders of reason, and for millenia we have carried out this charge with the understanding that our arch enemy is emotion. This view is plausible and easily motivated. All of us can point to episodes of fear, lust, pride and disgust overwhelming our ability to think clearly and behave rationally.  But to cast emotion as the enemy of rationality on this basis alone is like diagnosing the gut as the enemy of digestion because it sometimes produces cramps, dyspepsia, vomiting and diarrhea. We need to understand the function of emotion before we can know whether to treat it as a friend or foe of reason.

Recent work in psychology and neuroscience has begun to show that emotion is not hostile to rational decision-making, but integral to it. One of the first to guess this correctly was the greatest philosopher of the modern period, David Hume.  Hume, as you may know, argued that reason alone has no power to motivate, baiting his opposition with polemical pithiness like the now (in)famous:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. 

and

'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

Philosophers have since felled forests attempting to unpack the precise meaning of pronouncements like these, but the gist is clear enough.  Hume advanced an empirical hypothesis, viz., that emotion (passion, desire) is what causes all human behavior. Hence, it is impossible for emotion and reason to be in opposition, and it is impossible to perform any action on the basis of reason alone.

Hume's hypothesis turns out to have been correct to some degree.  For example, as a result of the work done by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio we have learned that people who have certain forms of brain damage can reason well while having no ability to make rational decisions. This is roughly because the damage is to brain structures that process and transmit our emotions to those that produce reasoning. Afflicted people will reason expertly but not act, simply because they never get the emotional input that is required to pull the trigger.

On the other hand, Hume was wrong in thinking that emotions and reason can not come into conflict, and this is because he did not grasp that our emotions are themselves a means of conveying the output of unconscious inferential processes. (To be fair, such a view would have been received as incoherent at the time; the unconscious mind was, at best, a paradoxical plaything of poets, not natural philosophers.) According to what we now call dual process theories of cognition, human beings have two systems for making inferences and producing behavior. System 1 is responsible for the rapid, intuitive, effortless, massively parallel and mostly unconscious inferences that we need to survive in the natural and social world. Think, for example, about the amazing amount of information you immediately infer from a fleeting shadow or facial expression. System 2 is the laborious, conscious, serial and highly flexible process of inference we associate with calculation and conscious reasoning.

Our emotions, intuitions, hunches and gut feelings are primarily associated with the informational outputs of System 1. System 2, by contrast, is a capacity, perhaps unique to humans, to monitor the outputs of System 1 and to try to correct them when they go awry.  System 1 and System 2 are both prone to error, but for different reasons.  System 1 errs because rapidity is achieved by imprecise methods like association, stereotyping, bias and instinct.  System 2 errs primarily because it requires sustained attention and effort to perform properly.

Without the information supplied by the rapid and typically trustworthy calculations of System 1, reason would be swamped with work it is incompetent to perform. (This, for example, is the predicament of autistics, who often have very high IQ's, but have extraordinary difficulty processing language.)  It is true that, like our digestive tract, our emotions sometimes run amok and genuinely interfere with the normally smooth functioning of the mind. It is also true that System 1 does not know its own limitations. (Hell, it does not even know it exists!) But without it we would be lost.

What does all this mean for philosophical practice? Here are a few suggestions.

First, philosophers need to finally and fully reject the rationalist conceit that the best of us are people who draw conclusions and make decisions on the basis of reason alone. Vulcans are no more physically possible than philosophical zombies. All rational inference ultimately depends on emotional feedback.When the conclusions we reach through careful ratiocination don't feel right, we philosophers have a strong inclination to reject them, just like anyone else. For too long we have obscured this by calling the feelings philosophers appeal to 'intuitions' housed in a mythical rational region of the philosophical mind called the 'intellect.'

Second, we need to try to stop being frustrated (an emotional reaction :-) when people don't change their minds and their behaviors in response to arguments (ours, of course) they can not refute. This is just not the way the normal well-functioning mind works.  People are as prone to being misled by delusive reasoning as they are to being blinded by the strength of their feelings and it is profoundly unwise to automatically privilege one over the other in any categorical sense.

Finally, we need to get comfortable with a vocabulary that explicitly grants emotional reports significance in the arena epistemic.  My own view here is that we should learn to draw a clear distinction between our belief that a proposition is true and our feeling that it is true, and not just for the purpose of dismissing the latter from serious philosophical discussion.  I would like to constrain the idea of believing that something is true in such a way that it indicates a System 2 inclination to assent to a proposition on the basis of careful consideration of explicitly formulated evidence. By contrast I would constrain the idea of feeling that something is true to an inclination of System 1 to assent to a proposition on the basis of inferential processes and information, much of which may not be consciously available.

As I see it, one of the primary benefits of this way of speaking is that it reduces our incentive to misdescribe and rationalize our feelings as evidentially based beliefs, just to get them taken seriously by others.  If we respect feelings of truth and falsity from the beginning, then we can conduct more constructive inquiries aimed at feeling what we believe and believing what we feel.

Perhaps surprisingly, our traditional conception of the rational agent does not suffer greatly from giving emotion its due. Recognizing that our feelings can be important indicators of a truth that has eluded our reasoning does not in any way give feelings a veto when a conflict arises. When we just don't feel right about a conclusion produced by reason, the proper response is more reason, not more feeling. Sometimes System 2 will discover that System 1 was indeed picking up on evidence lurking under the surface.  But other times, especially as scientific knowledge of the evolutionary and neurological basis of System 1 grows, we will discover that the the feeling is an illusion resulting from one of its intrinsic blindspots.  In such cases, no matter how strong the feeling, rational inquiry must prevail.

G. Randolph Mayes
Professor
Department of Philosophy
Sacramento State

Breaking the spell of language

G. Randolph Mayes

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.  ~Ludwig Wittgenstein


Since DoR is a philosophy blog I thought our first step into the blogosphere could be a meta-step, a post about the nature of the dance itself.

A lot of you know that Wittgenstein was the father of what we now call the Linguistic Turn in philosophy. He is known for claiming that many problems of philosophy are (what Rudolf Carnap later called) pseudo-problems.  Wittgenstein said that many apparently profound philosophical questions are actually confusions that result from a kind of illusion. We are tricked into believing that we are thinking about some property of the world when we are really thinking about some property of language. 

One of Wittgenstein's early mentors, Bertrand Russell, puts this beautifully in a 1923 lecture on vagueness.

Reflection on philosophical problems has convinced me that a much larger number than I used to think, or than is generally thought, are connected with the principles of symbolism... In dealing with highly abstract matters it is much easier to grasp the symbols (usually words) than it is to grasp what they stand for. The result of this is that almost all thinking that purports to be philosophical or logical consists in attributing to the world the properties of language. 

My absolute favorite example of this is the nature of truth, which certainly sounds like a profound question about the the relation of our thoughts to the external world. If you study the concept of truth in an introductory philosophy class, your teacher might motivate it by saying something like this: "If a statement is true, then clearly there must be something that makes it true. In philosophy we are trying to understand what that something is." 

Well, wait.  Way back in 1933 a logician named Tarski provided a famous definition of truth that doesn't particularly satisfy this intuition at all. Tarski successfully treated truth as a meta-linguistic predicate. What this basically means is that he saw 'true,' not as a word belonging to the part of our language that we use to talk about the world (the object language), but rather a word belonging to the part of our language that we use to talk about language (the meta-language). 

If this sounds all dry and technical and too demanding for a blog piece, hang in there. I'm trying to save your freakin' soul here. 

The basic idea is just that when we utter a sentence like "Snow is white," there are a number of practical reasons why we would choose to express the information contained in this sentence by talking about the sentence itself.  We might say '"Snow is white" is true,' or more simply "That's true." The important point here is that on Tarski's definition the meta-linguistic sentence containing the word 'true' does not contain any more information about the world than the original sentence. It's just a different way of communicating the very same information.

So one slightly bombastic way of understanding Tarski's work on truth is that he gave us a way to break the spell that the word 'true' has cast over philosophically inclined thinkers for thousands of years.  He showed that we can use the word in a perfectly straightforward and intuitive way while explaining the belief that there must be some profound metaphysical relation that makes sentences true as an illusion. It is an illusion that results from the surprising difficulty of distinguishing statements about the world from statements about language.

The idea that sentences of the form  "S is true" do not contain any more information than is contained in the sentence S itself is what we now call a deflationary view of truth.  This idea can be traced to Gottlob Frege, but it was first developed carefully by a lesser known and incredibly brilliant philosopher named Frank Ramsey, who died very young. (Both Ramsey and Frege were profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein, with whom they both corresponded.)

The deflationary theory of truth is popular, but it is not universally accepted. (Ironically, Tarski himself does not seem to have accepted it.) Those philosophers who reject the deflationary account may say something like this: "Well, yes, Tarski certainly provided an analysis of one meaning of the word 'true,' but that doesn't mean it is the only philosophically significant meaning."  Of course they are right about that. It is still possible that there is some completely distinct philosophically significant sense of the term. But if the deflationary account is not the whole story on truth, it has certainly shifted the burden of proof.  It is now up to people who believe otherwise to show what, beyond their own suspicions and intuitions, the deflationary view has failed to account for.

Every year I read (or at least start reading) lots of articles by philosophers who seem happy to go about their business as if the Linguistic Turn never happened. They practice their craft as"analytic philosophers" but without any real awareness of the concerns that brought this style of philosophy into existence in the first place. For me, Wittgenstein's account of philosophical problems completely changed the rules of the game. I do not think all philosophical problems are due to linguistic confusion.  But the first thing I suspect about any philosophical theorizing is that the people engaged in it are bewitched. And since I know how hard it is to detect, I suspect I usually am, too.

Further reading:  The best piece I ever read on the Linguistic Turn is the introduction to Richard Rorty's anthology by the same name.  The article is called: "Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy." Check it out.

G. Randolph Mayes

Department of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy

Sacramento State