The Epistemic Impotency of Arguments

The role of reason in forming, justifying, and analysing beliefs

The role of reason and arguments in forming beliefs is often heavily overstated by some philosophers. Whilst I love a lot of analytic philosophy, I also recognise that it all too easily risks missing the forest for the trees. With a focus on endless specificity, rigid logics, and formal argumentation; the analytic tradition can at times, overplay it’s hand. I think we should realise that most of our beliefs are actually formed by some sort of emotion, intuition, or experience. Instead of running away from this fact, we ought to embrace it, and use to understand how reason and logic can actually be used in our epistemological framework. I want to explore this issue, and what the role of reason and argumentation actually is in forming and justifying beliefs.

How We Form Beliefs

Everyone has heard of cognitive bias. This is the propensity of human beings to form beliefs first and then seek out evidence that confirm them. The psychologist Micheal Shermer takes this theory one step further, claiming that essentially all of our beliefs are formed on the basis of emotional responses to particular experiences.¹ Unfortunately, he uses this theory to argue for a radical scepticism and dismissal of religious beliefs, but I’m not going to go that far. What I do want to point out is that this theory is becoming increasingly popular in psychology and cognitive science.

The scientific consensus is that, contrary to the claims of the enlightenment, we are not nearly as rational as we like to think. Humans are not reason computers that process data and spit out logical conclusions, but instead we are largely shaped by our experiences and environment which lead us to form beliefs based on pattern recognition and unconscious mechanisms. Both Shermer and other psychologists like Matthew Lieberman ground these processes in evolutionary psychology. They point out that we didn’t evolve to detect truth, but to detect threats. Based on evolution alone then, our reasoning faculties should be looked at with suspicion.

The Problem of Justification

So, what does this mean for our epistemic justification? The problem of circular justification is a well known issue in philosophy. It is a sort of chicken and egg problem, but instead of poultry we have ontology and epistemology. The problem appears when you realise that any epistemological theory is ultimately going to be reliant on prior metaphysical facts about reality. By the same token however, one’s ontology is also fundamentally reliant on your prior epistemology. This becomes super problematic when we are trying to figure out what makes a belief justified.

Justification in epistemology is the attempt to determine upon what basis a person ought to be believe something. This isn’t about how to determine whether something is actually true, just whether or not the person in question has succeeded epistemically to sufficiently support their own beliefs. There are various theories about how this happens. To name a few;

• Foundationalism: One’s beliefs should be built upon foundational “basic” beliefs.

• Coherantism: One’s beliefs are justified if they generally cohere with one’s broader set of beliefs.

• Infinitism: One’s beliefs are justified by an infinite regress of reasons.

• Evidentialism: One’s beliefs should be based on the evidence for them.

• Scepticism: True knowledge is impossible.

Personally, I would take a broadly coherentist approach. This is because, as we have established, people usually form their beliefs based on their experience, not as a result of some conscious rational process. So either, as the foundationalist wants to say, you posit a set of brute beliefs that don’t need justification, or, as the evidentialist wants to, you deny that most of your own beliefs are actually justified at all. I think both of these approaches makes an absolute mess of the concept of justification, to the extent that we may as well put it in the bin.

The reason I think coherentism works, is because it is closest to the actual reality of how we think and feel about our own beliefs. Okay, yes, I am deriving and ought from an is- you can return to your grave now Hume- but I just don’t see how else to make sense of this concept without simply abandoning it. Basically, I believe that as long as there are no glaring contradictions or absurdities within your belief system (that you are aware of anyway), you are justified in holding the beliefs you do.

This is why I think that religious belief is perfectly justified. Even the weirdest and wackiest of religious traditions can be rational when we understand that, with or without empirical data, we are all creating stories, narratives, and frameworks, through which we understand our own experiences and reality more broadly. Attempting to escape this fact leads to absurd conclusions or impossibly high epistemic standards. What this entails is a paradigmatic way of forming and assessing beliefs and systems thereof. For example, in science, you posit a hypothesis and test it based on empirical tests. I suggest that in philosophy, you ought to test your hypothesis based on coherence and theoretical virtues.² Essentially, what explains the most, the best.

Of course, the big problem with coherentism is that different people could have completely opposing beliefs but nonetheless both be justified in having them. I think however that this objection gives human beings too much credit in their ability to apprehend objective reality. I personally think this is very much misguided. I base this on a critical realist approach to metaphysics, which I intend to explore more in future articles, but for now suffice to say that I do not think complete objective knowledge of reality might ever be grasped by the human person. It nonetheless can be cautiously approached through the collective effort of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual enquiry.

The Role of Reason and Argumentation

Recently I have been listening to Dr Graham Oppy’s view of arguments and his thoughts have very much inspired what I am about to say.³ Although I think he may be getting at a slightly different, more specific problem, I want to extrapolate from what he is saying into some larger musings on the role of arguments in philosophy more broadly. The important point he is making is that one’s beliefs are entirely antecedent to any arguments you make or analyse. I take this to infer that your decision about whether an argument is sound will be based, not on something within the argument, but whether or not there is something within your existing worldview that is resistant to the truth of one or more of the premises.

To give an clear example, if I present you with an argument for veganism, and you are not already a vegan, it is more likely than not that you will deny one of the premises before I have even laid them out. This is because your a priori assessment of the kind of considerations that may make someone vegan, is that they are untrue or unimportant. If this weren’t the case, you’d probably already be vegan, or, you just haven’t thought about the issue hard enough. Thus, the only benefits of providing a deductive argument are a) to formalise my thoughts to facilitate further discussion, and b) to highlight any considerations or commitments you may not already be aware of.

On their own then, arguments are completely impotent. They don’t hold any inherent value in philosophical discussion or enquiry. What is of actual import is the discussion an argument prompts. From a coherentist perspective, the premises should be attacked or defended based on whether they are coherent and if they commit someone to a reductio ad absurdum. If the person can show the coherence of their position, and/or are willing to bite any bullets you shoot at them, then there is absolutely zero persuasive force behind the validity of your argument.

This means that experience forms our beliefs and then reason becomes a way to test them. You see this in religion where beliefs are formed from the mystical experience and then metaphysical explanations are sought which develop into ever more complex systems of thought. This interplay and corrective relationship between the left and right brain, faith and reason, rationalism and empiricism; ought to be accepted and integrated in our philosophical pursuit. Instead of resisting these facts and asserting the priority of logical arguments, we should be more realistic, lest we discredit the value of philosophy.

I have a book called ‘Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy’, and although it's interesting and instructive, reducing the history of philosophy to a series of arguments is severely problematic. Philosophy isn’t just about sets of propositions, but exploring the deepest questions about reality in whatever form that may come. Mysticism, metaphor, poetry, narrative; are all properly the heritage of philosophy as well as rigorous argumentation. Applying your reasoning faculties doesn't always mean logical deduction, but can go beyond simple rational analysis. To think that the deepest truths about reality can be reduced to mathematical formulas or logical propositions is to do physics, not philosophy.

Conclusion

I think the over-emphasis on arguments that we have witnessed in contemporary philosophy is somewhat misguided. I don’t deny that there is place for them within reasoned enquiry, but we should place more focus on analysing paradigms and beliefs systems through coherence and theoretical virtues, instead of relying on propositional arguments.

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1. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

2. Theoretical virtues are things like; testability, empirical accuracy, simplicity, unification, consistency, coherence, and fertility.

3. He outlines this in a conversation he had with Dr Ed Feser on ‘Capturing Christianity’ which you can watch here.