by
John Mullen
"I need new thoughts.” —James L. Brooks in As Good as It Gets
Intelligence, writes John Mullen, should not be confused with reasoning ability. Some of the most intelligent people produce terrible reasoning, which he calls soft thinking.
Many, if not most, individuals do not know how to reason well and they do not know that they do not know how to reason well. They listen unquestioningly as specious experts tell them how to entertain themselves, how to run the planet, how to improve their health, what history means, what society needs for the future or what’s wrong with the right tackle on the local football team. Hard thinking, by contrast requires training, practice and will power
Mullen argues that all areas of human thought and activity are open to reasoned judgments. Opinions, attitudes and feelings that cannot be backed up with good reasoning should not be trusted. Letting others make decisions for you is a disgrace, an enemy of personal freedom. Hard thinking is important for individuals to flourish. The absence of good reasoning, he argues, poses the greatest threat to vibrant democracy and civilization itself.
One threat to reasoning is what he calls naive pragmatism, believing what one wants to believe regardless of the evidence. Naive pragmatists fit into at least two categories: Conscious and unconscious. Conscious naive pragmatists (The Nixon administration) are often aware of their own lies, but do not care about the truth because the truth would hurt their feelings or interfere with the causes they care about. Unconscious naive pragmatists (members of ascetic cults) obliviously believe the things that make them feel good.
Depending on the individual, anxiety-—cognitive dissonance—-arises when a belief is contradicted by the evidence or when a disliked claim is supported by evidence. One then chooses to face the facts or chooses to believe claims that are at odds with the facts. The more one makes a habit of ignoring or misweighing the evidence, the less likely or less severe the anxiety becomes and the greater the pleasures of soft thinking become, but at the cost of the truth. We should make a habit of being consciously aware of cognitive dissonance when it arises within us.
Hard Thinking should have made greater mention of the role of social pressure in anxiety and the many ways humans respond to anxiety. Among the ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are:
· Changing beliefs, actions, or both for the better.
· Changing beliefs, actions, or both for the worse.
· Deciding that the issues and contradictions involved are trivial (trivialization).
· Engaging in other practices to boost self-esteem.
· Engaging in distractions.
· Creating a semi self-lobotomy so that contradictions rarely occur and when they do, they are hardly noticed or not noticed.
· Recognizing that there is no real contradiction in a particular case and your intuitive contradiction sensor is mistaken. For example, if someone says pro-life and pro-death penalty or pro-choice and anti-death penalty beliefs are contradictory, one may feel anxiety, but one can relieve the anxiety by recognizing that there is no contradiction unless one believes that the right to life is an absolute rule for all humans and fetuses. Abortion and the death penalty are separate issues.
Distinguishing facts from truths, Mullen defines a fact as a claim having the support of a well-reasoned argument. In Mullen's version of the correspondence theory of truth, a true claim adequately describes the world. The truth about a specific situation does not change, but facts can be proved false by stronger arguments. The death of Robert Kennedy is currently a fact, but if he were to turn up tommorrow, it would no longer be a fact. No matter how well-reasoned our argument, we can never be 100 percent sure whether a fact in an inductive argument is indeed the truth, but we can support a conclusion with high enough probability to act with confidence. (Unfortunately, humans often exaggerate the amount of uncertainty in things we do not want to do or believe and underestimate the amount of uncertainty in things we want to do or believe. Moral nihilists, for example, believe there is little or no such thing as moral knowledge--a moral belief about moral beliefs that they are surprisingly certain about.)
Whether a conclusion is proven does not depend on who creates the argument. It does not depend on how many people believe the argument. It does not depend on how persuasive the argument is. Logic is the only path to finding facts and the truth. Improving the accuracy of our worldviews is a constant process. Ideally, the things that matter most should be magnified in our minds with searing importance. Claims that lack the support of good arguments are opinions.
The metaphor that compares beliefs to buildings with foundations is mistaken. A belief system, writes Mullen, is akin to a circular rope made up of many strands. Some beliefs can be removed easily. Others in the core are tightly held in place. Uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity are often uncomfortable. Humans psychologically prefer beliefs that are highly certain and beliefs that are provided by “privileged, foundational sources.”
Believing claims simply because they are found in a foundational source is flawed because the claims contradict other claims within the source and contradict other foundational sources. The claims are too vague and many contradict well-supported facts. A belief that is “based on faith” is a fanatically held belief and fanatical beliefs have horrific consequences. We should require adequate evidence before believing anything. Believing things without enough evidence leads to evils and degrades us for being chumps.
Likewise, believing a claim merely because some scientist said it is a big mistake. No claim should be given extra weight merely because it is alleged to be “scientific.” When it comes to reasoning, there are no authorities, only experts whose arguments should be weighed carefully. (As someone once said, to space aliens, human submission to misguided authority would look little different from animal submission.)
There are many reasons why reasoning is unpopular:
· Reasoning takes too much effort. Reading is most fun when you flow along with what the author writes. Reasoning introduces stoppages, second thoughts and the need to think up additional reasons, better reasons, and counterarguments.
·
Many in positions of power are anti-reason. Good reasoning would contradict their beliefs.
·
Reason is not a major part of curriculums. The less
people are exposed to something, the less likely it will be popular and the
less it deserves attention.
· Reasoning causes anxiety.
All of the above are terrible reasons for not reasoning.
The fact-value distinction, writes Mullen, does not exist. Claims should be divided into value claims and empirical claims. Value claims state which thing are “good, bad, better, worse” and so on. Empirical claims state how things are, were, will be, and so on. Both value claims and empirical claims can be proven, unproven, factual, unfactual, true or false. Anyone who says a value claim can never be true or a fact is wrong. The value claim that people should not drink a gallons of used motor oil is an easy to prove fact while the empirical claim that the Andromeda galaxy contains aardvarks performing tunes from The Sound of Music is an unproven opinion. Mullen goes on to prove that value judgments are usually not matters of tastes, feelings or cultures. Pessimism about ethics because bad people use moral language does not make moral language suspect any more than the new-age gurus use of physics language makes physics suspect. He also points out that science is full of value judgments and that scientists constantly make value judgments. Because we do not know all the moral answers does not mean we can not know some moral answers. No one says to the physical scientist, "You do not know the mass of every star in the universe. Therefore, you can not know the mass of any stars." It is time people stopped pretending good values do not exist or that they are automatic or self-evident.
All moral beings should be open to well-reasoned criticism. “What the heck right does she have to tell me that? Screw her,” is not the response of a hard thinker. If you are overly concerned with criticism and hurt feelings, rarely giving or listening to well-reasoned advice, do not be surprised if your judgment is poorly developed. Well-reason criticism treats individuals as full humans. Evasion of important matters or dishonest praise is unhelpful and condescending. Reasoning, however, should also not be used merely to point out the flaws in other people’s arguments, but to find and build up the best aguments.
Hard Thinking clearly and concisely summarizes logical fallacies, the use of definitions, the flaws of relativism and misplaced tolerance. Tolerance has its limits. By itself, tolerance does not make one a good person. Corpses are tolerant. How much good do corpses do? The organization and choice of fallacy categories in Mullen’s work is concise, nonredundant, and easy to understand--much better than other logic textbooks. Considerable space is put to good use explaining errors in probabilistic and causal reasoning. The coverage of the philosophy of language is outstanding. This is the sort of clarity and expert work that develops from years teaching a subject. Careful thought has gone into almost all sentences. It is rare thing to see a book hitting on almost all its cylinders.
This work should have more examples and nonexamples. Mullen is overly generous toward the Islamic religion. His idea of "based on faith" having little to do with Islam and my idea of the role of fanaticism in Islam are in conflict. Hard Thinking claims that whether socialism or capitalism is fairer has not been resolved. I think it has been resolved.
Mullen mentions the Hawthorne effect: Bad ideas sometimes cause improvements because of the interest and attention offered. There might also be a negative Hawthorne effect: Good ideas often fail because those who implement them have no interest in them or are opposed to them.
Those serious about thinking should read this book. Hard Thinking is a better alternative to vacuous and verbose “critical thinking” books. Critical thinking is often merely a catch phrase and a bunch of feel-good games that do not challenge stinkin’ thinkin’. Hard thinking is a subject that can be rigorously studied. For a couple dozen bucks, this is a better education than many get after eight years of college and a hundred thousand dollars in direct costs, and thousands more in opportunity losses. Those looking for paper television should look somewhere else. Highly recommended. Book review article by J.T. Fournier.
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