Reason: A Double-Edged Sword in Every Day’s Discourse
Some people believe that humans are rational beings by nature and that they can act according to truth because they appeal to reason, but I beg to differ. I believe that humans are emotional beings, they appeal to their feelings above all else, and I think reason is neither a friend nor enemy of truth. Reason is like a well-made knife, give it to a chef, and you will have a delicious dinner for the night; give it to a thug, and it means danger to you and your loved ones. To support my claim, there are two things I will argue in this paper, the first one is that reasoning is not what bullshitters lack, and the second argument is that bullshitters reason to fulfil their motives, not to preserve truth.
What is bullshit? What counts as bullshitting? The purpose of telling bullshits is similar to telling lies, the primary goal of bullshitting is to deceive people, the difference lies in the way liars and bullshitters deceive people. The common trait that bullshits and lies have is that they are trying to manipulate others for their agendas. But there are things that liars do that bullshitters do not, which is to be fully aware of truth-value pertaining to what they tell others. For liars, knowing what is true and what is false is essential, for their way of deception depends on it; liars manipulate people into believing something false to be true, and vice versa. The same does not necessarily apply to bullshitters, for knowing the difference between being true and being false is not something that bullshitters care about. What bullshitter is manipulating is not necessarily the truth-value of the things they say, but it is the impression people have about them.
There are four main purposes people try to accomplish whenever they are reasoning: description, explanation, defense, and justification. Description is to give people an idea of what it is that you are speaking of. Explanation is to answer the question about the cause, and what goes on beneath the surface. Defense is to address critics, to counterstrike in response to differing opinions. Justification is persuasion, it is to convince people to change their minds and accept whatever it is that you say or propose. There are two things that people do when they are trying to accomplish those four purposes, formulating a theory that could be supported through logic and empirical data, and evaluating others’ theory and its supporting evidence. This paper argues that bullshitters practice reasoning with motivation, some may refer to it as motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning explained most simply, is to generate hypothesis, form theories, and evaluate data in a self-serving manner.
As it is mentioned earlier in the paper, bullshitters are perfectly capable of reasoning, just as well as honest people and liars. Although bullshitters can reason just as well as anyone, there is a difference between honest people and bullshitters. The former reasons to get things right. Bullshitters, however, reason to get what they want, reasoning is just one of the best ways to achieve that goal. Like Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt argues that humans have two systems of cognitive process, the first type is good for emotions, pattern matching, memory, and sense-related perceptions. The second type is good at making predictions based on memories of past events, learning new skills, language-based communication, and conceptual and logical thinking. For Jonathan Haidt, type one cognition is proficient at making judgments and taking actions, and type two cognition acts like a defense attorney, making all possible cases to confirm the choices made by type one cognition and to fight against the accusers.
To prove his point, Jonathan conducted an experiment at University of Virginia, where he picked 30 students to participate in the experiment, where they were given scenarios that were designed to be unsettling yet harmless. For instance, students were to decide the moral of a story, where brother and sister had sex together. Unsurprising to him, the majority of the students found these scenarios unsettling, disgusting and immoral, many of them concluded that the scenarios were either morally wrong or harmful. What was interesting to him, was that most students were caught having dumbfounding when they were asked to explain their positions, and they refused to change their opinions even after their reasons failed to support their beliefs.
Take one of the students in the study as an example. The student found the story about siblings having sex to be disgusting and morally unacceptable, like many other students. His best argument against incest was birth defect, an outcome no one desired. The interviewer rebutted his argument by pointing out that his argument would only apply in ancient times, where contraception is not available, and having an aversion to incest is useful for avoiding birth defects. This is no longer an issue, for contraception is readily available. If the student truly were appealing to truth, he would have accepted the interviewer’s argument and accepted that there was no harm in the story, as disturbing as the story was. Nevertheless, he did not give up on his position, he continued to search for reasons, such as appealing to authority and traditions, to justify his opinion on the story, and even after he ran out of reasons to refute, he still clung on to his opinion without change. It is obvious that the student did not care if the interviewer was making an honest argument, what he truly cared about was to get what he wanted, and what he wanted at the moment was to protect his belief about incest. He did not care if his reasons were good or not, he certainly did not care if the interviewer was making a truthful argument. What he truly cared about, at that moment, was to defend his stance without losing the impression of a rational man who cares about truth.
Throughout the study, students tried hard to defend their positions. Despite their reasoning being proven to be irrelevant, they would not be convinced and would keep searching for new reasons for their beliefs, to get what they want. They would try to find as many good reasons as needed for them to maintain their positions, and refused to change their mind even when they “ran out of reasons”. This, I argue, is the way bullshitters reason.
Bullshitters reason to protect choices that have been made out of feelings and intuition. Bullshitters do not reason in favor of truth, they reason in favor of their motivation. For bullshitters to reason in favor of their motivation, they need to reason in ways where they stand to benefit, by applying different standards and rules in their process of reasoning. Some psychologists, like Ziva Kunda, may describe such behavior as motivated reasoning, and the idea of motivated reasoning is that people practice reasoning to safeguard their position. Motivated reasoning comes in two parts, the first part is the self-serving formulation of theories, and the second part is self-serving judgment.
Bullshitters can form theories subjectively, they can do it by using past knowledge, like their memories, to form hypothesis about something in a self-serving manner. With the ability to form theory in a self-serving manner, they can reason and make arguments in any way that would lead to their favored conclusion and reject one that is undesirable. For example, an extroverted Jack may see an extroverted person named Flinn. Seeing Flinn being an extrovert and happily married, Jack might be able to argue that he has been an extrovert himself, and he is having a good relationship with his wife like Flinn, therefore being an extrovert is a positive trait for a happy marriage. As one could see, it is only possible to form self-serving hypothesis because of people’s ability to start their inquiry with a conclusion, a confirmation bias. They cherry-pick evidence and patterns that can be connected to any outcome they want to argue for, such as Jack's conclusion that extroversion is a beneficial trait for marriage, and the argument was made by connecting the facts that both he and Flinn are extroverts, and both of them are happily married.
Not only could bullshitters form theories subjectively, but they can also judge other theories with similar attitudes. In Kunda’s research, he gave his subjects articles about the detrimental effects of caffeine consumption towards females. He made negative effects specific to females so that only female subjects in the experiment should be motivated to practice motivated reasoning in evaluating data for they were the only group who were threatened if the said information was true. True to his prediction, the highest level of responsiveness came from female subjects who were heavy coffee drinkers. Among the subjects, heavy coffee-drinking females were more sensitive toward the article than any other groups, and they were more inclined to dismiss the article than female subjects who were not heavy caffeine consumers. When people have their ideas challenged, they evaluate evidence in a self-serving manner, and it could be done by purposefully applying different standards on different things. Some people may deny the evidence about dinosaurs because there is a 60-plus million years gap between the known dinosaurs and human history, for the evidence is “too old”. However they do not share the same criticism for ancient scripture, and they would use different rules to justify their trust in ancient scriptures. When bullshitters make an argument out of their motivation and are met with challenges, they would reason their way through. If they are confronted with evidence, they can simply assess those data in a self-serving manner, like holding harsher standards or different standards for others while going easy on their own theories and evidence.
In conclusion, not caring for truth does not mean that bullshitters are unable to reason, not considering truth-value of one’s statement does not mean that they are incapable of making logical arguments. Reason is a double edge sword, for bullshitter can reason just as well as an honest person does, the difference is how they use it, and what they do with it. I believe that people with high integrity reason for the truth, while bullshitters reasons out of self-serving motives. Bullshitters care about their personal feelings and impressions that they have on others more than the value of truth and integrity. Everyone needs to remember that someone being full of shit is not equivalent to someone being stupid, telling bullshits does not disqualify the bullshitter from levelheaded thinking, and does not disable anyone from making logical claims. Like liars, bullshitters are charlatans who pretend to be something that they are not. Reasoning for bullshitters is just something they can use to fulfil and accomplish whatever it is that they desire and to pretend as if the argument they put forth comes from honest, unbiased thinking.
Work Cited
Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit. 1st ed., Princeton University Press, 2005.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Illustrated, Vintage, 2013.
Kunda, Ziva. “Motivated Inference: Self-Serving Generation and Evaluation of Causal Theories.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 53, no. 4, 1987, pp. 636–47. Crossref, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.4.636.