2.3: Reasonableness

For your beliefs to be rational, or reasonable (we’ll treat these terms as synonyms), is just for them to be held on the basis of the best available reasons. To be reasonable, in the literal sense of the word, is to be amenable to reason. That is, the reasonable person is the person who forms or revises beliefs by yielding to the best reasons. A reasonable person is a person you can reason with.

Good reasons are truth-oriented. So, all it means for your belief to be reasonable is for it to be held for the most truth-oriented reasons available. This much should make it clear why it is good to be reasonable. Being reasonable is more likely to get you true beliefs and true beliefs are good because they help you act effectively, achieve your goals, avoid hazards, and they give you a shared basis for understanding and communicating with others.

We should note that the words “rational” and “reasonable” can also refer to choosing or acting in ways that aim at maximizing some goal or value other than truth. So, for instance, a rational investor is not so much concerned about getting at truths as getting a good return on investment. Words are often ambiguous. The way to be comfortable with ambiguity is to get clear on how words are being used and to track the various usages carefully. Talk of rational or reasonable belief (as opposed to choice or action) can generally be understood as truth-oriented simply because to believe something is to take it to be true.

Rationality is not a kind of human imposed authority over what is true or what we should believe. The only thing that is authoritative concerning what we should believe is how things are. Again, to believe something is to take it to be true. To believe rationally is just to believe in ways that target the truth well. To believe irrationally is to aim badly at the truth. Rational belief isn’t guaranteed to hit the target of truth. But irrational belief involves a kind of unforced error.

Talk of rationality, objectivity, and truth have some difficult connotations in the minds of some. These concepts often get associated with things like maleness, authority, or power. These difficult associations appear to be based on antiquated stereotypes of one sort or another. But thinking based on stereotypes is highly unreliable and perhaps we are in a position now to see how thinking in terms of stereotypes misleads many of us concerning these fundamental concepts. To be reasonable literally means to be amenable to good reasons (this especially includes the good reasons of others who think differently). To be a reasonable or rational believer involves a good measure of intellectual humility and a constant awareness of how easy it is be misled in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. So, reasonable people are careful and cautious thinkers. Good critical thinkers get well acquainted with lots of logical fallacies, mistakes in reasoning, in order to avoid known pitfalls in thinking. The rational believer doesn’t let ego and willfulness get in the way of her evaluation of claims and reasons. Being reasonable is not about aggressive self-assertion. Instead it crucially involves cooperation with fellow inquirers. The reasonable or rational believer doesn’t force things, but rather yields to best reasons and evidence. I won’t delve into stock stereotypes here except to point out that being amenable to understanding other’s perspectives, being intellectually humble, cooperative and cautious, and yielding to the better ideas don’t stereotypically characterize maleness, power, or authority. But they do characterize reasonableness and rationality.

We started with two metaphysical assumptions. Namely that we have a shared reality, the objective world we are all a part of, and that we each have limited and fallible experience of that reality. To this we’ve added a few definitional remarks about truth, rationality, reason, belief, subjectivity and objectivity. And we’ve reasoned a bit on the basis of these two modest assumptions and a few definitions. In the definitional remarks I’ve tried to lay out standard philosophical usage clearly and straightforwardly.

The reason it is good to understand truth, rationality etc. in the manner I’ve laid out here is that it facilitates clearer communication and understanding of our diverse experiences and diverse ways of thinking. This allows us to cooperatively improve our understanding, ways of thinking, and ultimately our limited grasp of what’s true. As a result of this, we are empowered to act more effectively, avoid hazards in our interactions, understand and appreciate each other more significantly, and enjoy things.

Some will be tempted to object to what I’ve laid out here on the grounds that people are free to define words like “truth” and “rationality” as they please. In a sense, people are free to do so. Nobody has the power to prevent it. All the other concepts we might be tempted to attach to these words are out there and as a linguistic community of a couple people or of a couple billion we could agree to name those concepts as we please. But to insist on defining things as we like amounts to the privatization of language, with the primary result of undermining our capacity to communicate with one another and understand each other in the limited ways that are open to us. While we could quibble about how to define “truth” and “rationality,” the only result of this would be to talk about something else instead. Something other than how we stand as subjects to each other and our shared objective reality.