This is part 2 of a 3-part guest post by long-time commenter Richard S. Russell. Read part 1 here.
All these inputs—definitions, axioms, assumptions, genetics, sensations, memories, and testimony—get fed into the hopper at one end of our factory. Then they pass through one of eight gates to undergo some kind of process that produces decisions at the other end. This brings us to the meat of the matter, the processes in the middle. There are eight of them. I’ll discuss them in order from most to least reliable.
Processes
1. Logic. Formal logic dates back to ancient Greece and is based on the concept of the syllogism. A syllogism has two explicitly stated premises (or “if” statements) which are combined using rules of logic to produce a conclusion (a “then” statement).
Example #1: If all men are fallible, and if Aristotle is a man, then Aristotle is fallible.
Logic tells us absolutely nothing about the truth of the two premises. For example, consider:
Example #2: If all squares are round, and if this triangle is a square, then this triangle is round.
Example #2 follows exactly the same structure as Example #1 and thus leads to a conclusion which is equally valid (that is, reliable according to the rules of logic). The conclusion is, of course, ludicrous, but that’s because the premises are ludicrous. However, logic will yield true conclusions from true premises. It does not and cannot, however, make any a priori statements about whether premises are true.
But, as processes go (and it’s processes we’re considering here—assumptions were covered when we looked at inputs), logic is absolutely cracker-jack—the most robust and reliable process of them all.
2. Reason. This is the standard used in law: “Under the circumstances, what would a reasonable person do?” It’s similar to logic but is heavily larded with considerations of the practical. You take a “reasonable” amount of time to gather evidence from “reasonable” sources, then use logic or a “reasonable” facsimile thereof to arrive at “reasonable” conclusions. You don’t spend an undue amount of effort on minutiae, because in real life there are always other demands on your time. A crucial element in reason is the acceptance of your own fallibility. You should admit to the possibility of error and keep an open mind toward new evidence. Having an open mind, however, does not mean you need a hole in your head. If something clearly makes no sense, you should say so and waste no more time on it.
3. Confidence. You are confident of something on the basis of its track record or the history of similar situations, without taking the time to examine the particulars of the current situation. “My car started last winter when it was 15° below zero, and I’m confident it will do so again this year.” We overtly recognize that there are degrees of confidence: “My car started easily enough last winter when it was 15° below zero, so I’m pretty sure it will do so now that it’s 30° below.”
4. Trust. This is similar to confidence, except that the way the language has evolved, we usually express confidence in things and trust in people. Additionally, because we’re social creatures and want to like other people and have them like us, we sometimes trust people who don’t necessarily have a track record of good decisions. Little children usually give parents a free ride when it comes to trust, because they’re in no position to know any better. Adults tend to trust authority figures more than is warranted. And so on. Thus I rate it lower on the scale of reliability than confidence.
5. Chance. The roll of the dice, the flip of the coin, the turn of the card—seems like a hell of a way to make up your mind, doesn’t it? However, I advance the premise that, in real-world terms, it’s not so bad. You usually don’t resort to chance as a decision-making technique unless you’ve reduced your alternatives down to two or three options, no one of which is clearly better than any of the others. In short, your time might well be more efficiently spent making some sort of decision than in further dithering over exactly which 1 will give you that extra one percent of benefit. At least the concept of chance implies the choice between alternatives, which means you haven’t just blindly accepted the first idea that popped into your head. And, of course, chance has a real role to play in experimentation, where you want to be sure that the choices of, say, which patients get real drugs and which get placebos isn’t governed by hidden assumptions or prejudices.
6. Obedience. This is like a corrupted form of trust. The implication here is that you are doing what someone else tells you to, but for reasons of pressure, coercion, immaturity, feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, threat, etc., rather than a free-will decision. If you choose not to obey, you may be opening yourself up to consequences worse than any bad decision which would result from obedience. In a perverse way, this means that obedience may actually produce decisions which are good from a holistic viewpoint, since giving up your lunch money (normally a bad decision) may mean that you won’t get the crap beaten out of you. Still, you may recall Lord Acton’s statement that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Over the long haul, giving any other person this kind of power over you is likely to lead to decisions being made on your behalf which are progressively worse for you. If you can get away with it, question authority.
7. Hope. We now start getting pretty tenuous in terms of whether these processes are at the level of conscious thought. If I were to say “My car started last winter when it was 15° below zero, and I think it will do so now that it’s 60° below,” I’ve passed out of the realm of confidence and into the domain of wishful thinking, or, in a word, hope. Pop psychology has a different buzzword for it: “denial.” Another phrase is “magical thinking.” (Rationalist: When you hear hoofbeats, don’t think zebras, think horses. Fantasist: When you hear hoofbeats, don’t think horses, think unicorns.) These are used in decision-making when the evidence points toward a conclusion that we really don’t want, so we base our decisions—for no particularly good reason—on the hope that what we do want will come true.
8. Faith. Last and least we come to faith, the decision-making tool of last resort (and thus the one most favored by the priesthood). Faith is when you want to believe something but there’s not a shred of evidence for it and quite often lots of evidence against it. Whenever you have evidence to support a conclusion, you’d use one of the seven previous decision-making methods and would have no hesitation in saying so. Faith gets hauled out only to support conclusions for which there is no reason to believe in their truth, validity, efficacy, or efficiency.
Indeed, faith is listed among these other processes only in a kind of honorary fashion, because arguably there’s no “process” involved at all: the assumptions at the input end (like “God exists”) essentially go straight thru, unmodified, and come out the other end looking not a whole lot different than when they went in (kind of like creamed corn when you’ve got the flu).
That final process, faith, is examined in detail in the final part of this essay.
They say, “In the end, everything will make sense.”
They never seem to mention that it could start making way more sense now,
if you would just question some of your fundamental assumptions.
— CrustaceanSingles.com
Image credit: Derek Finch, flickr, CC