Dialects of Reason

This blog post is associated with the following video on my YouTube channel:

For the moment, here is simply a transcript of that video:

Around the world today so many public discussions descend into polarised debates in which each side thinks the other cannot think clearly or is acting disingenuously. But most people do genuinely want our societies to improve, so why can’t we discuss the options in a civil and constructive way? Obviously there are many factors at play, but I think a useful perspective on this problem is to recognise that often each side of the discussion is reasoning from a different dialect of reason. In this video I’ll explain what I mean by that.

To do this, we’re going to be looking at what is going on when people are using their reasoning to discuss an issue. One way to look at this is to imagine what a third party observer might think about the quality of the reasons given by each of the participants. This is a perspective from which we often do assess the rational, calculative quality of the reasons being given.

But I’m not interested in this perspective here as we mostly make judgements about good or bad reasoning when we are one of the reasoners involved in the discussion. And, indeed, it’s not clear that we can ever really take a disinterested, third party perspective. So, I’m going to define a notion of good versus bad reasoning from the perspective of the reasoners involved in the discussion.

And my contention is that the reasoners are very rarely doing any kind of explicitly calculative rational assessment of the quality of the arguments they are hearing. Most of the time the reasoners are just in the flow of the discussion, making instantaneous, intuitive judgements about the quality of each other’s arguments and thereby rapidly knowing what they want to contribute next to the discussion.

But, in this state of flow, on what basis do we judge an argument as being well reasoned or not?

I think we can make an analogy here with the instantaneous way in which we judge the linguistic correctness of sentences. For example, the sentences, “Whether they was a killer, whatever they was, …” or “here’s you a piece of pizza” both just sound wrong to my ears.

Whether they was a killer, whatever they was, ….

Here’s you a piece of pizza.

Intellectually I know that these sentences come from different dialects of English, of which there are plenty. And there are links below for where I found these examples. Obviously the sentences will sound perfectly fine for members of the communities that speak those dialects. So these sentences are not objectively wrong, they’re not badly constructed, they’re just different from my dialect.

But I still can’t help myself from instantly noticing the difference between my dialect and theirs. We don’t work out this difference by explicitly thinking through the grammatical or vocabulary divergence from my own dialect. To me the sentences simply sound like they are badly constructed.

And I think we often instantly judge the quality of reasoned arguments in a similar way. It’s as if we each come from a community of thinkers with their own dialect of reason. Arguments that progress with the typical moves and rhythms of our dialect of reason meet our discursive expectations with ease. The arguments simply sound right. In contrast arguments from a different dialect of reason can instantly sound wrong, they grate against our expectations in a similar way to a badly formed sentence. And we notice this without having to think it through, without deliberation, without rational calculation.

Let’s look at a clip where I think we can see two people get frustrated with each other’s dialect of reasoning. The clip is from an interesting channel, called Jubilee, in which people from different communities of thinkers are brought together to discuss a contentious issue, I’ll put a link below. In this clip three socialists and three capitalists try to find some middle ground and the lady and the gentleman highlighted in this clip each make moves in their reasoning that would probably have been accepted within their own community of thinkers, but get challenged here.

There’s obviously a lot going on in this clip and by the end of the clip the lady is explicitly recognising that the two of them are experiencing a breakdown in shared language, but we also see both of them making moves in their reasoning that would probably have sounded like strong, valid points in their own communities’ dialects of reason, but just didn’t make any sense at all to each other here.

And it is worth noting that just as people are capable of switching between different spoken dialects to suit the social circumstance, so too I think we can change between different dialects of reason to suit the context in which we are arguing. For example, the same person might be a lawyer and member of a church and also a tribal elder and in each of these situations reasoned arguments will be most effective if they are presented in the appropriate dialect of reason. For each context you would draw on different common knowledge; you’d use different vocabulary; you’d have different ways to progress with an argument and you’d have different ways to judge the strength of an argument. Some communities will be persuaded by the appropriate use of parables, others by peer reviewed papers.

And when people from different communities come together, they should try to work out what is the shared dialect of reason that will be appropriate for the new context. So all of the participants of the discussion I just showed were trying to reason in a way that they thought will sound sensible for everyone involved. But the clip showed a moment in the discussion where this attempt to find a shared dialect of reason broke down.

Let’s look again at how this unfolds. We’ll see that the lady starts her point with confidence, but then recognises that the assertion motivating her reasoning, that she thinks of as common knowledge, might possibly sound wrong to others in this group.

The gentlemen jumps on this mistep, and then goes on to make a reasoning move that he thinks is strong,

but the lady clearly thinks his move doesn’t make any sense at all in the context of their discussion.

My point is that they each wouldn’t have made these moves unless their intuition was that they were making “good points” in favour of their position. And their lines of reasoning would probably have been accepted by their own community of thinkers. But in this shared context each of their moves sounded unexpected and wrong to the other.

So, I think we can define what counts as good versus bad reasoning without referring to rational logic, but instead only referring to communities of thinkers and their dialects of reason. A good line of reasoning is one that would be accepted as such by your own community of thinkers because it meets their discursive expectations with ease. A bad line of reasoning is one that sounds wrong because it grates against your discursive expectations. That doesn’t mean you’ll always agree with an argument that sounds well constructed, but you are very likely to disagree with an argument that sounds badly constructed. And we can all reason in multiple social contexts each with their own dialects of reason in which certain kinds of argumentation moves and styles are expected and others are not.

I recognise that for many people this definition is going to sound too weak because it lacks the traditional link to logical coherence that many see as foundational for reasoning. But remember, this separation is precisely what I was looking to achieve at the start of the video. In other videos I explore various different ways that these now separated ideas of reason and rational can then be understood to interact with each other. In particular many dialects of reason will find rational, calculative arguments very useful and persuasive and so will see rational arguments as good reasoning by merit, rather than by definition.

But to link back to the start of this video, I think part of the unhealthy polarisation of our political debate happens because we live in such different dialects of reason. Within our community people from our “side” sound like they are reasoning well, but people from the other side sound terrible at reasoning. The traditional view of reason and rationality leads many to conclude that the other side of the debate can’t think properly or must be disingenuous. Some see this as the only way to explain how bad their arguments sound to us. But I think that’s just as much of a mistake as it is to judge people’s level of education or intelligence by the way that they speak.

All decent people want to improve things for our societies, and of course there will be genuine disagreements about how to best achieve that shared goal. But sometimes when we are most passionately disagreeing with each other, part of what is going on is that we’re failing to recognise that we’re each arguing from a different dialect of reason.

My hope is that this perspective will help us have more respect for each other as reasoners, even if we sometimes fail to understand each others’ ways of reasoning. And then maybe, when we come together, we can work harder to find shared dialects of reason in which we can have healthier public discussions.