by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
I am, by trade, a logician. Perhaps for that reason I find the stereotypical characterization of logicians as cold, unemotional, and detached to be personally offensive. Much as I admire and enjoy Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of “Mr. Spock,” I also wince at the way in which it has captured our current misunderstanding of what it means to be rational. Even many of my fellow logicians suffer from this misunderstanding. Text books on logic often urge students to set their emotions aside. They even classify certain emotions as fallacies of logic, most notably the Ad Misericordiam (Appeal to Pity) fallacy. But I disagree. Certainly, it is fallacious to try to use pity to distract us from relevant considerations: “Surely, members of the jury, you cannot find my client guilty of murder! Think how it would break his poor mother’s heart if he were to be sent to prison.” But it is hardly fallacious to point out that people are suffering when this is a relevant consideration: “We should send disaster relief immediately! People are without food, without shelter, hungry, and dying.” In the face of such an argument, the fallacy would be to reply, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, that’s just an appeal to pity! Be logical and set your emotions aside.”
To be a good logician, emotions are necessary. The purpose of thinking is to solve problems, and the source of all problems is, at root, human suffering of one kind or another. Hence, without a sense of human compassion there is nothing worthwhile to think about. The most rational person I ever knew was the doctor who oversaw my son’s treatment as he was fighting leukemia (a fight which he eventually lost). She was a brilliant researcher. But a person does not go into a field such as juvenile oncology unless she cares about the suffering of children. She took her compassion with her into her laboratory and thought with all her might, “How can I save this child’s life?”
The purpose of poetry is to move us—to transport us—perhaps to joy, or longing, or even laughter. Often it fails, because, as Gustave Flaubert says, “human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.” A poet may not be able to move the stars, but sometimes a poet can succeed in moving us. A good handbook on the writing of poetry will explain many of the techniques: economy of words, imagery, alliteration, rhythm…but, enough of that. A good handbook will also reveal the one essential secret without which no poem, no matter how cleverly crafted, no matter how mellifluous its language, can succeed. In three words, that secret is: tell the truth. Readers can sniff out insincerity and superficiality. No words, in poetry or in prose, will move us unless we think they are true.
But, how do we come to know the truth? That, of course, is precisely the question that the study of logic sets out to answer. Hence, corresponding to the three types of reasoning—each with its own logical structure (see Bruce Thompson’s Fallacy Page for a lengthier discussion)—there are three ways of sniffing out the truth: through resonance, through causality, and through formal necessity. All three are rational in the sense that all three guide us toward the truth, although they do so in different ways, and are beset by different pitfalls along the way.
The first way is the most simple and direct. We know when someone is speaking the truth because the words resonate in our own souls. The quote by Flaubert, for example, moves me because I know my own longings and my own frustrations with language. I, too, long to make music so exquisite it will cause the stars to weep. I, too, fail because word themselves seem inadequate. So I think Flaubert is speaking the truth. But I could be wrong. This is a domain in which it makes sense to talk about “your truth” and “my truth.” These are not objectively public truths, however much we may share them in our hearts. A poet may whisper them quietly to a reader, and a reader may shed a tear in private, but another reader might just shrug and say to himself, “I don’t get it. Why should I care whether the stars weep?”
The second way of recognizing truth is harder to shrug off, but it is prone to errors and missteps. In some cases, it can even be subverted and counterfeited. Consider, for example, how we are moved when we see a photograph of a naked, emaciated child running down a street in a war-torn town. We are moved because we know the photograph shows us the truth. How do we know? Because we understand (in broad outline) how the photograph came to exist. There was a photojournalist with a camera standing in that street when the child ran toward him. The shutter opened. Light poured through the aperture. Cause and effect. The truth—the facts on the ground—caused the photograph to be the photograph that it is. In the same way, we may be moved when a memoir reveals a personal experience. The truth—the facts of the writer’s life—cause the memoir to be the work that it is.
But, of course, photographs can be touched up or important details can be cropped out. Nowadays we can even superimpose images. A photograph can be caused to be what it is by intervening forces other than the facts on the ground. Hence, we learn to be cautious. However, where we trust that the stream of cause and effect has not been unduly interrupted, we can be moved to action. This, of course, explains why people around the country made a habit of tuning in to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily press briefings on the status of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York. He showed us graphs created from data collected from facts on the ground. He explained how the data might waver from the truth to some extent, but he also explained that it was the best data available. We had to trust it until better data could be found. So we were moved by it, and we adjusted our behavior accordingly in the interest of saving lives. By contrast, we tuned out Donald Trump’s competing press briefings, since we had no reason to believe they were anything other than self-serving bluster.
The third way of recognizing truth is through a demand for formal consistency. This method has the advantage that it cannot be faked, but it has the great disadvantage that it can be intricate and circuitous, and so is not well suited to poetry. But the truths it reveals can still be moving. Mathematicians can be enraptured by the elegance of a proof. Formal relations have all the wondrous beauty of a spider web at dawn. But the real power of formal necessity is that it shows us where our ideas are jarringly inconsistent with each other. This kind of reasoning can show us, as Plato would say, where a soul is out of tune with itself.
For example, in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, the character Callicles tries to draw a distinction between ‘natural morality’ and ‘conventional morality’. The natural order of things, Callicles claims, is for the strong to impose their will on the weak and to do whatever they please. Hence, by the ‘natural morality’ we should admire strongmen—leaders who enrich themselves at the expense of the weaker folk who comprise the majority of society. Conventional rules—the ‘conventional morality’—are merely popular fictions created by the majority in the hope of defending themselves from strongmen. In reply to this argument, Socrates asks, are not many men together stronger than one alone? Callicles agrees that they are. He must. At this point in the discussion ‘strong’ is understood only in its most literal sense: who would win in a tug-of-war. But then, Socrates continues, those who comprise the majority of society are actually stronger than the individual strongman. Again, Callicles has to agree. So, since conventional morality is created by the majority, and natural morality is created by the strong—but the majority are the strong—it follows that the conventional morality and the natural morality are one and the same (at least as we have so far defined our terms). Hence, there is no distinction to draw.
Of course, Callicles responds by changing his definition of ‘strength’. However, his new definition is no more coherent than his first—indeed, in many ways it is worse. No matter how Callicles tries to adjust his meanings he finds himself trapped in logical contradictions. The whole discussion is long and intricate, but Socrates makes no errors in it that I can find. In the end we must conclude that no one with a harmonious soul can believe that right consists in venal, narcissistic politicians lavishing wealth on their friends, persecuting their enemies, and doing whatever they please. This is an incontrovertible truth. And it should move us—some of us to righteous anger and others of us to shame, if we are capable of feeling shame.
Plato’s dialogues often seem to be only about arriving at truth by means of reasoning. But they are also about the way in which reasoning and truth move us to be better people. In another dialogue, Symposium, the character Alcibiades—who is as venal and narcissistic as any politician alive today—complains, “Socrates is the only man in the world who can make me feel ashamed!”
In the pursuit of truth, certainty is never possible. However, someone who can find a way—through resonance, through cause and effect, or through formal necessity—to express what we recognize as a sincere best guess at the truth has a good chance of transporting us.