Truth As Process

On the false dichotomy between reason and emotion

If I could change one widely held misconception, it would be the idea that there exist two fundamentally different ways of knowing: the rational or logical, on the one hand, and the emotional or intuitive, on the other.

This dichotomy has led to the belief that some ways of knowing — like science — deal only with logic, while others —like religion — primarily involve using emotion. In this way, reason becomes the key to understanding the natural world, while intuition (or spiritual energy) is how we make contact with the supernatural.

I reject this dichotomy. Not because I reject one of these two aspects of our thinking — the rational and the intuitive. But because emotion and reason are really two sides of the same coin.

The process of drawing an inference requires an emotional coefficient. And emotions, for their part, can be thought of as shortcuts that allow an individual to jump to an inference without having to go through the logical steps normally needed to establish it.

Let’s look first at how emotion is central to rational thinking. Then we’ll turn to the ways that emotions incorporate experience, allowing us to draw inferences without necessarily being aware of why we are drawing them. Finally, I’ll explain why science and religion actually have a lot more in common than is normally supposed. Both, I’ll argue, are primarily ethical in nature.

Inference as Commitment

All inferences necessarily involve an emotional coefficient. The writer Lewis Carroll illustrated this point humorously in his story, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.

In the story, the Tortoise asks Achilles to think of the following logical syllogism, taken from Euclid’s Elements.

(A) Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this triangle are things which are equal to the same.

(Z) Therefore, the two sides of this triangle are equal to each other.

The Tortoise admits that most people will readily agree that Z follows from A and B. Even if they don’t think that either A or B is true, they would agree that if they were true, then Z would follow.

But, the Tortoise asks, suppose I accept the truth of A and B, but refuse to accept the hypothetical (C), that “if A and B are true, then Z must be true.” How can you make me agree to (Z) now?

You could ask me to grant the hypothetical (C), to insert it as another step in the deduction, so long as we suppose a new hypothetical (D), stating that “if (A) and (B) and (C) are true, then (Z) is true.” But of course, I can then just refuse to accept the hypothetical (D).

Well, you can see where this is going. We never get to the conclusion, because we always need another hypothetical requiring us to take the next step in the deduction. Frustrated by the Tortoise’s unwillingness to accept the inference, Achilles fumes that “Logic would force you to do it! Logic would tell you ‘You can’t help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!’ So you’ve no choice, you see.”

I think what Carroll has hit upon here is that logical deduction is not dependent on abstract rules of inference like modus ponens or modus tollens, rules which the average person finds quite difficult to put into practice in unfamiliar contexts.

Instead, inference depends on meaning. The meaning of a concept almost always has some kind of emotional valence, however slight. And that valence commits us to seeing it in a certain light. Logical arguments succeed by shaping our conceptual space in such a way that our pre-existing commitments are leveraged to generate new ones.

In other words, there is such a thing as “what it feels like to draw a conclusion.”

And just as we can be fooled by optical illusions that play on our evolved ability for processing visual stimuli, we can also be fooled by logical fallacies that use our emotional commitments to induce the feeling of drawing a conclusion even when it doesn’t follow.

Emotions as Summaries

Our evolution as a species has prepared us to perceive the world in certain ways. Part of what is involved in perceptual predisposition is the tendency to infer certain states of the world from other states.

One clear example is what psychologists call “agency detection.” If I hear some rustling in the bushes, I might infer the presence of another living thing, and my body will actually undergo an emotional reaction, putting me on alert in case the thing happens to be a predator, say.

We have evolved that trait because brains that connected “sensing the indications of an agent’s presence” with “behaving as if an agent is in fact present” were more likely to survive than brains that didn’t. The inference doesn’t always follow, of course. Sometimes the rustling is just the wind. But it followed enough in our evolutionary past that we evolved emotions that allow us to shortcut what would otherwise be a longer, deliberative process of inferring the agent’s presence logically from other criteria.

And what is true on evolutionary scales is also true on the scale of a single human life. For example, I’ve done thousands of chess puzzles. As a result, I often have an intuition, when I’m seeing a new puzzle, that a piece sacrifice will work. The intuition comes first, and only later can I confirm it by calculating variations. Indeed, if not for the intuition, I probably wouldn’t start looking at variations involving that sacrifice at all.

In both cases, experience cuts a cognitive groove from stimulus to inference, and emotion lubricates that groove, allowing us to jump from the stimulus to the inference without having to “reinvent the wheel” of going through the logical proof every single time.

What science and religion have in common

Understanding that reason and emotion are two sides of the same coin, we can recast the traditional dichotomy of science as a rational exploration of the natural world, and religion as emotional communion with the supernatural.

This view of science and religion is often held by those who see both science and religion as essentially bodies of truths. The truths of science form one catalog of facts, and the truths of religion form another. Neither can comment on the other because both are describing different realms.

But in reality, both science and religion are primarily ethical endeavors. The essence of science is a commitment to a particular methodology — the scientific method — and should not be confused with the facts this methodology establishes at any given time. Those facts are subject to revision. One’s integrity as a scientist isn’t bound to any given finding, but to the methods that resulted in that finding, and which may one day overthrow it.

Religion, for its part, is also an ethical project. But rather than targeting the natural world, the aim of religion is to address questions of an existential nature. What is the meaning or purpose of my life? How do I live a good life? How do I live in harmony with others and with the natural world.

Just as a scientist who put certain preferred conclusions above the scientific method could be said to have abandoned the project of science, so too someone who confuses faith as an existential stance with faith as a mere body of beliefs, has ceased to be truly religious. Indeed, the theologian Paul Tillich described this confusion as nothing less than “idolatrous.”

True science, and true religion, must incorporate both reason and emotion, must recognize their essential roles in truth-seeking behavior. And it is the process of seeking truth, rather than the truths we land on, that really matters.