FACTS & LOGIC and Lived Experience: The Middle Way
Pragmatic rationality humanises facts and sheds light onĀ feelings
Post (2) of a four-post essay. Post (1) is here.
The full essay makes up Part 4 of a broader series about language. It stands alone if thatās what you want out of your reading life, but for best results read the previous installments in the seriesāāāthis, this and thisāāāfirst.
In 2020 there are a huge range of opinions on how useful 2+2=4 logic is outside of mathematics, from the rationalist communityās āreason will save us allā approach at one end to the uncompromising emotionalism of the hard left and hard right on the other. Some people acknowledge the importance of emotion but argue it needs to be trained (āyou need to teach ācritical feelingā to defeat groupfeel no less than critical thinking to fight groupthinkā). Others acknowledge the importance of data but point out itās never innocent of human bias and always leaves crucial parts out: ādecisions in the real world require negotiating between what we think the data means, what human value weād like to assign to it and what stories about it we can get others to accept. Data alone is not knowledge, and it is certainly not wisdom. It rarely says as much as we think it doesā.
One of the more interesting attempts to find a compromise between hard facts and hard feelings is the pragmatic approach to reason. This broadly says that when youāre talking about everyday (non-mathematical) reasoning itās much more useful to look at how it functions than what it claims to prove.
Pragmatism actually dates back to the 1870s, and represents one of philosophyās first attempts to grapple with evolutionary theory. One variety of it argued that the best ideas about the world are the ones that best increase your speciesā fitness. In other words, the things that are the most useful for humanity are also the most true for humanity, and this is the only truth worth talking about.
The pragmatist William James famously said that all genuine truths have ācash valueāāāāin other words, they help you navigate your life better. (Thereās an interesting connection here to the emphasis on right living over āobjectiveā truth in many Eastern philosophies.) As Alex Scott puts it, for James truth āis not something abstract. Truth is what we say about ideas that work when we apply them to our experience. False ideas do not help us to meet the demands of experienceā.
PRAGMATISM IN 2020
The pragmatic view has entered the mainstream lately thanks to thinkers like Nassim Taleb and Jordan Peterson. Taleb argues that your beliefs donāt count unless you have āskin in the gameā and can put your money where your mouth is. He explains his āinstrumentalā view of reason in āHow to be Rational About Rationalityā: āIn science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find [prey at a distance]. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.ā
He goes on to say that just as your eyes deceive you slightly about objectsā true nature in order to help you to act, our belief systems often deceive us about the literal nature of reality in order to keep us alive: āSurvival comes first, truth, understanding, and science laterā. The key lies in understanding that the apparent content of beliefs often has nothing to do with their actual function, so that many superstitions that look silly or āillogicalā to outsiders are anything but: āJudging people on their beliefs is not scientific / There is no such thing as ārationalityā of a belief, there is rationality of action / The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerationsā.
He uses the example of āthe āconstructive paranoiaā of residents of Papua New Guinea, whose superstitions prevent them from sleeping under dead trees. Whether it is superstition or something else, some deep scientific understanding of probability that is stopping you, it doesnāt matter, so long as you donāt sleep under dead treesā. He also mentions the Jewish practice of using one sink for meat and the other for dairy: the practice may be difficult to understand for an outsider, but itās āforced [the community] to eat and bind togetherā over the years. Whatever the thinking behind food separation is, the result has been positive.
Jordan Peterson agrees that truth is largely a matter of what works. Because reality is huge and our knowledge of it is extremely limited, a lot of the time the best we can do is construct a practical theory like āif I do x then y will happenā and consider our theory proven if y in fact does happen: if I walk that way Iāll probably get to the door, hey look, I got to the door.
Crucially, these theories arenāt dry āpredictionsā but expressions of our desiresāāāwhat we want to put into and get out of the world. āMotivated reasoningā is a dirty term, but I suspect Peterson would agree with Hume that practically all reasoning is emotionally motivated. We only form a hypothesis about something if we care about that thing: why figure out how to get to the door unless you want to leave the room?
For Peterson, this pragmatic approach is a way out of the ghetto of postmodernism, which he defines like this: āsince there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceivedā¦no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derivedā¦[meaning] all interpretation variants are best interpreted as the struggle for different forms of powerā.
His take: āThe fact that there are an unspecifiable number of interpretations does not mean (or even imply) that there are an unspecifiable number of VALID interpretationsā¦Valid at least means: āwhen the proposition or interpretation is acted out in the world, the desired outcome within the specific timeframe ensues.āā
Crucially, Peterson isnāt just talking about individual outcomes here, but the most desirable outcomes for the species as a whole. Drawing on Jean Piaget, he says: āYour interpretations have to keep you, at minimum, alive and not suffering too badly today, tomorrow, next week, next month and next year in a context defined by you, your family, your community and the broader systems you are part of. That makes for very tight constraints on your perception/interpretations/actions. Games have to be iterable, playable and, perhaps, desirable to the playersā.
(By āiterableā he means that your interpretations and behaviours need to work consistently over a long period of time. You canāt just randomly change your behaviour from day to day: today Iāll feed my family, tomorrow I wonāt.)
This pragmatism underlies Petersonās well-known fascination with the biblical stories. For him, the stories convey profound moral intuitions drawn from millions of years of humanity and its ancestors acting in the world and thousands of years of reflecting on what strategies have served us best. Action first, then a story about the action, then the āmoral of the storyā.
The āmoral of the storyā part is where pragmatism wins out over both cold logic and postmodernism. If we reason about the world to help us act in it in a way that benefits both ourselves and everyone else, that gives reason a profound ethical dimension: āPostmodernism leaves its practitioners without an ethic. Action in the world (even perception) is impossible without an ethicā.
Of course, saying that the most important truths have cash value, deceive us about the facts to inform us about the truth and give us a compass to live by isnāt the same as saying thereās no such thing as objective reality. 2 and 2 are always 4. Scientific experiments are replicable. And uncomfortable truths donāt stop being true just because you want them to be.
The pragmatistsā point is that reason shouldnāt rule your life, it should enable it. Itās your servant, not your master.
The more you try to wrap your head around complex political debates and realise that neither FACTS & LOGIC nor lived experience can point the way out of the fog, the more important this insight gets.
WEāRE LIVING IN A SOCIETY!
Instrumental rationality combines the best of abstract reason with the best of lived experience. It says that over the millennia weāve all lived through certain experiences again and again and again. And bit by bit weāve come up with sensemaking descriptions for those things that have kept us alive, sane and functional. Some of the descriptions have been literally true (these plants are edible, these are poisonous) and others havenāt (the various creation myths). But all of them have served valuable functions over the years.
The āthickā language that weāve inherited from our ancestors includes religious stories. Fables and fairy tales. Zen koans. Sayings like āA stitch in time saves nineā and āA bird in the hand is worth two in the bushā. ClichĆ©s get a bad rap these days, but the reason theyāre repeated so much is that theyāre both profound and useful.
Take all of a cultureās sayings, clichĆ©s, folk wisdom and ethical lessons (āthe moral of the story isā¦ā) and put them together and youāve got a pretty impressive store of life advice. Not all the sayings are true for everyone all the time the way 2+2=4 is, but theyāre true often enough and at a deep enough level to be good rules of thumb (or āheuristicsā in philosopher-speak). They may not be rational in the narrowest sense. But theyāre reasonable.
The reasonable consensus of your culture does a lot of your thinking for you. Wittgenstein was right: everything takes place in a context. People usually interpret āYou donāt always know bestā to mean āObey your parents!ā or āListen to your teachers!ā, but itās much broader than that: societyās collective store of wisdom can also be found in your shrink, that book that changes your life, that movie quote that speaks to you, that college course that opens your eyes, that friend you look up to, that cause you dedicate your time and energy to. All of the people you respect are telling you things that you may already know deep downāāābut theyāre articulating them for you. They expand your world with their language.
Maybe you think that youāre floating free from convention, following your own star, disregarding everything that society tries to ram down your throat. But if youāre even reading this it means youāve inherited a rich legacy of comfort, security and technological innovation that generations of people have fought, died and worked hard for. Do you believe that people should be treated as if they have rights, that democracyās good, that people of different races are your equals, that people from disadvantaged groups should be given a chance to succeed? Did you come to all those beliefs by yourself? If not, then youāre a believer in the power of tradition.
Tradition is generally code for āstuff right-wingers likeā, but at this late-capitalism stage of the game weāve got to apply the same label to feminism and the other liberation movements that have helped shape society for decades. More on the left-right division later.
GUT FEELINGS AND PHRONESIS
Rules of thumb are also what guide individuals through 99% of their lives. Your gut feelings are drawn from your own personal cache of unconscious wisdom, which itself draws on memories going back through your life. These memories combine to create personalised rules of thumb, all of them articulated at the level of feeling instead of language.
So you go to answer the phone and look at the name that comes up. Your head tells you āBetter answer, itās the polite thing to doā, but before itās even started speaking your gutās already chimed in with āNot this guy again. Heās been big trouble for us before. If you answer the phone heāll probably keep you on too long and bully you into making concessions to himā.
Thatās not a rational calculation the way ā2+2=4ā is, but itās a reasonable one based on years of experience and your intimate knowledge of yourself. Your gut feelings may be selfish at times, but at least you know they have your best interest at heart, whereas a lot of your mindās thinking is made up of statements that seem FACTUAL and LOGICAL but are actually rationalisations for actions you know you shouldnāt take.
A lot of our thoughts are based on internalised expectations, guilt, erroneous core beliefs and obsessive calculations that have become unmoored from the world of reality (hence āoverthinkingā). But the gutās feeling is based on what it knows is true based on your personality and life history. We need to listen to both our mindās facts and our gutās feelings and keep them in dialogueāāābut 9 times out of 10 the gut is right.
The ancient Greeks had a term for the kind of reasonableness that steers you through the world in a way that benefits both you and the world: phronesis. This can be translated as āwisdomā, āpractical intelligenceā, āgood judgementā, āgood characterā or even āmindfulnessā. Itās every individualās interface between objective facts and lived experience, a Middle Way where both perspectives dynamically update each other as you live and grow: experience tells you facts, the facts guide your actions, your actions create new experiences.
Phronesis is more flexible and alive than mere FACTS and LOGIC. And it gives you more freedom and agency than the fundamentally passive notion of your life being an āexperienceā. Your life is a series of actions.
But the personal is political, and following your own path has ramifications that go beyond you: sometimes your rules of thumb will bump up against your societyās rules of thumb. If youāre lucky, the two will be aligned more often than not. But some smart, disagreeable types are condemned to the isolation of following their own star, and theyāre often some of historyās most important movers and shakers. They envision new ways of living years, sometimes centuries, before anyone else.
For a while now liberals have guarded the intuitions and self-descriptions of individuals (you canāt tell me what to do!) and communities (you donāt speak for us!). And conservatives have stood up for societyās collective rules of thumb, which they argue are there for a reasonāāāwhether youāre an individual (listen to your betters!) or a group (this is how we do things here!).
Conservatives say that if everyone did what they wanted all the time the social order would break down and everything weāve worked so hard to build would collapse. So before you do something that makes sense for you, ask yourself why your intuitions are more likely to pan out than the things that have been proven to work for humanity again and again. Ask yourself what the world would look like if everyone acted like you, and whether even you are best served by pursuing temporary pleasure over the habits and disciplines that history has taught us create meaning and fulfilment in life.
Liberals reply that in a world that changes as fast as ours traditions become obsolete really fast, and the way to keep ourselves happy and healthy is to keep updating our ideas to reflect new circumstances.
Theyāre both right.
INSIDE VIEW, OUTSIDE VIEW
The traditions of psychology and sociology balance the individual/communityās gut feelings about themselves with societyās collective store of āTry this, itās good for youā wisdom. This makes them great examples of instrumental rationalityās āAct in the world, see what happens, learn some lessons, become more reasonable, act some moreā approach at the personal and the cultural levels. The more patients psychologists treat over the years and the generations the more they learn about humanity as a whole, and the more they learn about humanity the better they get at helping individuals.
If youāve participated in as much counselling as I have, you know that a lot of the things about you that you regard as unique and specialāāāincluding your deep, dark problemsāāāreally arenāt. Most of your behaviours fit into recognisable patterns, and trained experts know the patterns better than you do. So during a good session thereās always part of you saying āYou donāt really know meā, and another part of you saying āDamn, you understand some of me better than I do myselfāāāand have finally told me what to do about itā (pragmatism again).
Both these intuitionsāāāthe āinside viewā that says you can only understand yourself from within and the āoutside viewā that says you need a fresh perspective on yourself sometimesāāāare correct. Youāre unique. And youāre not. You need both points of view to function.
The inside-outside dynamic also applies to societyās take on itself. The worldās changing all the timeāāātechnology advances, environments alter, demographics shift, some groups accrue power, others lose it, new sociological problems arise, old ones dissolveāāāwhich means that our traditions constantly need updating. Itās vital that we listen to what marginalised voices have to say and pay attention to the specific emotional shape of their experiences and concernsāāātheir inside view of themselves. People arenāt statistics, and you canāt find all the answers to their problems in āEconomics 101, page 10, paragraph 4ā.
But if we paid attention to nothing but groupsā inside views weād be paralysed. The very density of a particular groupās lived experience is exactly what stops people outside the group from being able to engage with every facet of it without becoming overwhelmed and immobilised. Besides, a group doesnāt stand alone any more than an individual does, and there has to be a system for balancing the competing claims of different groups and making sure thereās enough to go round.
The outside view is how society attempts to keep all the various moving parts of its complex systems in some kind of interdependent balance. You have to abstract out from specific situations. Look at the data and compare it to other data about other groups at other times. Examine whatās worked before. Consult statistics. Propose solutions. Engage with the generalities of FACTS and LOGIC.
The same cold truth applies to law. And medicine. Empathy in a surgeon is good. Empathy without knowledge, experience and detachment is a killer.
The crucial thing to bear in mind here is that the outside view isnāt the same as objective reality. A psychologist doesnāt actually know you better than you know yourself. Theyāre listening to your account of yourselfāāāyour inside viewāāāand noticing a few key phrases, abstracting out from them and comparing them to patterns theyāre familiar with, which enables them to help you. Thatās not the same as fully immersing themselves in your lived experience, and itās not the same as fixing you with the power of FACTS and LOGIC. Itās a matter of using just the right combination of empathy, intuition, knowledge, logic, flexibility, phronesis and responsiveness to get the job done. Pragmatically.
Ideally, society should treat all its members and communities the same way. Itās not that citizens are patients who need healing so muchāāāmore that they have certain claims on the state, and itās the stateās duty to listen to these claims sympathetically and weigh them up in light of history, evidence, tradition, flexibility, responsiveness and the demands of justice.
Then get the job done. Pragmatically.
So individuals need to listen to their guts except when they need to listen to society, and society needs to listen to its citizens except when it needs to listen to the dataāāābut what happens when citizens engage each other politically? What are the rules there? In the next part of this essay I suggest that societyās made up of different domains that are governed by different language games.