In Praise of Reason

Preface

Imagine that a mysteriously powerful scientist offers you a choice between two doors. Behind door number one is the ability to slowly convince many of your political opponents of the wisdom of your views by appeal to reason. Behind door number two is a serum that, once slipped into the water supply, will quickly make “the other side” think your political views are the right ones. Which door would you choose? Most folks I know, including myself, would be at least tempted to choose the magic serum. And many people would choose it immediately, without much thought. After all, politics concerns matters of serious import, and it is hard not to wish that those on the other side would either go away or be magically transformed into what we consider to be right-thinking people. It is easy to think that would be for the greater good. But even so, you might hesitate. There is something clearly wrong about manipulating people into unconsciously agreeing with you, even when the stakes are high and it would get the job done quickly and efficiently. We think there is something valuable in appealing to reasons. The process of giving and asking for reasons matters, independently of what it may happen to get us. Preface x Preface Of course, the value of appealing to reasons also depends on whether they are good reasons. Good reasons are based on good principles. So the aim of this book is to defend both the value of giving reasons in public discourse and the value of certain principles over others—in particular, the principles that constitute a scientific approach to the world. Appealing to these principles in public discourse matters, I argue, despite the fact that there appear to be—perversely enough—very good reasons to think that we can’t defend them with noncircular reasons. It sometimes seems as if every “first principle” ends up being founded on something else that is arbitrary: emotion, faith, or plain prejudice. If that’s so, then a magic serum is the best we could hope for after all. Nonetheless, I’ll try to convince you that we can hope for more. This problem of the value of reason is one of the oldest philosophical problems. And like many deep philosophical problems, it is not purely academic. Solutions to it have wider consequences for our culture. This book is an attempt, and no doubt an imperfect and incomplete attempt, to grapple with this problem. But it is also an invitation to take the problem seriously, and to join in trying to solve it. In the philosophical literature, “skepticism” is mostly associated with the idea that we lack knowledge. My own interest in the value of reason arises partly from a longstanding suspicion that the real interest in skepticism lies not in its consequences (or lack thereof) for our understanding of knowledge , but in the challenge it poses to the importance of reasoning and the practice of exchanging reasons. In my view, knowledge is often less important than philosophers tend to think. What matters most is being able to defend and articulate that knowledge. Preface xi My thinking on these subjects has many influences. These include certain themes of American pragmatism, and the naturalist yet humanist stance I find in John Dewey, C. S. Peirce, and William James. Another is the work of the late William Alston, my mentor and friend, whose pioneering work on epistemic circularity introduced me to these problems. I am still arguing with Bill, even now. Other writers who have had a significant impact on my thought include Ernest Sosa, Crispin Wright, and Michael Williams. Over the last six years, many other people have helped me with the ideas in this book, either in conversation or by comments on the manuscript. They include Donald Baxter, Robert Barnard, Paul Bloomfield, Tom Bontly, David Capps, Nancy Daukas, Michael Fuerstein, Patrick Greenough, Eberhard Herrmann, Klemens Kappel, Hilary Kornblith, Scott Lehmann, Bridget Lynch, Patty Lynch, Christopher McEnroe, N. J. L. L. Pedersen, Tom Polger, Duncan Pritchard, Paul Silva, Kent Stephens, John Troyer, Steven Wall, and Jeremy Wyatt. I also profited from presenting lectures based on this material at numerous places, including the University of Alabama, the University of Cincinnati, Fordham University, University College Dublin, Edinburgh University, Tufts University, University of St. Andrews, the University of Copenhagen, the American Philosophical Association, and the University of Aberdeen. Portions of chapter 4 derive...