Hi,
Reed Konsler maintains that:
<<
"Reason is a disciplined way of thinking, its purpose is to maintain
and strengthen belief in ones current model of the world."
>>
His argument begins:
<<
Let us say you were making a reasoned argument, the thesis of which
were some principle A like "people should be nice to each other,
whatever the circumstances".
You could conduct, as a logician or a debater, a formal process of proof:
<--snip the reasoning structure and the subsequent reinforcing of it, using serial and parallel support for the final premise-->
Reason is a process of assembling stronger, more resillient arguments. Thus:
"Reason is a disciplined way of thinking, its purpose is to maintain
and strengthen belief in ones current model of the world."
>>
Well, first off, it's clear to me that a jump from "stronger, more resillient arguments" to "ones current world view" is a VERY large jump. I can easily use reason to support conclusions I disagree with, in fact I often do. (it is often quite constructive to create as strong an argument as you can for a conclusion you disagree with; this is often called playing the Devil's Advocate. Subsequent work on refuting the argument can often shed light on details you otherwise would have missed, and sometimes you even end in convincing yourself!). I am saying that a better definition for the *justificational* role of reason would be:
"Reason is a disciplined way of thinking, one of it's purposes is to provide justification for belief in the conclusion of the argument[s] made"
Notes:
(1) "justification" above should be understood in the sense of
"evidence" or "reasons".
(2) One often does construct arguments to support ones current world
view, but that is *not* a property of reason, that is a property of
the *users* of reason. If you want to make an argument about the
human-centeredness of reason (ala _Voltaire's Bastards_, by John
Saul), I am willing to here it, but beware that Saul didn't convince
me.
However, as I said earlier, this is only one half of reason; the other half being the "falsificationist" or rational critism component, which is used exactly opposite to the above:
"Reason is a disciplined way of thinking, one of it's purposes is to falsify beliefs (theories held to be true), by showing how they conflict with other beliefs or accepted propositions."
Task: can we find a single sentence defining the purpose of reason that unifies these two?
ERiC