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Reasoning and Emotion, in the light of the Dual Processing Model of Cognition
Ronald de Sousa
Philosophy, University of Toronto (
ABSTRACT:
I begin, in §1, with some distinctions and an attempt at a working characterization of rationality that is intended to be usable across the domains of action, belief, desire, and even feeling. In §2 I sketch the ambiguous role that emotions play in our capacity to reason. I suggest that emotions span the two tracks or “systems” posited by “dual process” theories of reasoning, or what Daniel Kahneman (2011) has recently called “thinking, fast and slow”. In §3, the main features of that hypothesis are described, and some questions raised about its significance. In §4, I briefly characterise emotions and describe some of the ways in which they seem to contribute both indirectly and directly to our capacity for reasoning, and straddle the two systems. In §5 I compare the learned and the evolutionarily more primitive components of S1. In §6 I turn specifically to the contributions that epistemic feelings make to our epistemic ends. §7summarisesmy main conclusions.
§ 1.Preliminaries: What is rationality?
To describe someone as rational is generally held to be a form of praise. It suggests that they reason soundly, take appropriate notice of evidence in forming their opinions, and are willing to change their minds when confronted with a good argument for doing so; it implies that their attitudes are not grounded in superstition, swayed by prejudice, or driven by blind passions. Although it is difficult to see how one might find fault with such characteristics, it is also true that both laypersons and philosophers can be found to complain that one can be “too rational”. The accusation can stem from a number of concerns. Before trying to sort these out, it might be useful to fix the boundaries of my own usage. To that end, I begin with two stipulations about the word ‘rationality’, and make bold to offer a definition.
First, it is important to remember that the term can be used in either a normative or a categorial sense. These are distinguished by their antonyms. In the categorial sense, the opposite of ‘rational’ is ‘arational’, which applies to inanimate things and lower animals. (Whether it applies to higher nonhuman animals is contested). In the normative sense its antonym is ‘irrational’, which is usually taken as pejorative. In the phrase ‘rational animal’ the word must, of course, be understood in the categorial sense: it is precisely because human beings are capable of irrationality that they are said to be rational animals.
Second, the word ‘rationality’ covers more than ‘reasoning’. The latter concept belongs exclusively in the category of what is rational/irrational. There is no such thing as a-rational reasoning. Furthermore, reasoning aims at rationality in transitions between mental states (typically but not exclusively propositional states), to the exclusion of questions about the acquisition of such states. But although my title mentions ‘reasoning’ rather than rationality, I shall not adhere closely to this restriction. For my concern is with the role of emotions in epistemology more generally, and emotions relate to intuitions as well as transitions. I shall be interested in both.
Now for my definition. Despite the disputes and the vast technical literature to which the concept has given rise, I think it is possible to cut a fairly clean swath through those debates and provide a generic definition of normative rationality and irrationality. I suggest that normative rationality consists in the efficiency of means used in the pursuit of any given goal. Thus baldly stated, the definition must appear simplistic. Most of the complexities of the notion are packed into the questions that arise about the “goals” in question.
Our nature as human agents comprises four basic faculties. We experience the world, we have desires and form beliefs about it, and we act to change it. In acting, we pursue goals in the most obvious ordinary sense. So far, my simple definition works well enough: for any intentional action, we can identify a goal and assess the means we choose to it for efficiency. Any putative counterexample will, I surmise, rest on the fact that when pursuing a given goal, we necessarily have a welter of other goals and concerns that must also be taken into account. This can cause indefinitely many complications, but doesn’t impugn the general definition.
The specific form of rationality pertaining to the other faculties will be relative to the characteristic ends of that faculty. Although the notion of a practical goal is the most intuitively easy to grasp, it is not the most fundamental. More fundamental is the question of what goals are worth having: we could call this the goal of correctness in desire, or simply of valuing what is valuable. Similarly, we can criticise the rationality of our beliefs, in terms of the epistemic ends that govern what we believe and how we acquire beliefs. We can also, though more controversially, speak of the rationality of what we feel, providing we can identify the “ends” of emotion. In that spirit, we can tabulate the main forms of rationality in terms of the distinct goals to which they tend, their characteristic Direction of Fit (DoF), the intentional states typically concerned, and the processes that are assessed for rationality, as in Table 1.
TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Note that there is a certain symmetry between our practical and evaluative goals on the one hand and our epistemic goals on the other. For the pragmatic tradition, which goes back to Protagoras, truth is a tool of success: one needs to know how the world is in order to act effectively. Conversely, if one holds, with Socrates, that truth is the fundamental value, practical success is just a consequence of correct belief: its corollaries are that “no one does wrong willingly” and “virtue is knowledge” (see Menoand Protagoras in (Plato 1997).) In more recent history, William Clifford (1886) is on the side of Socrates: one ought to care more about truth than advantage – practical rationality be damned. William James (James 1979) was in the tradition of Protagoras, and so perhaps was Richard Rorty(1979): you should care about real consequences and not abstract truth – and your epistemic scruples be dammed.
In the light of these proposals, we can interpret and rebut the suggestion that we can be too rational. The reproach might stem from a number of concerns. One might be accused of being too rational because one fails to acknowledge the emotional reality of so-called “irrational beliefs”. If you have a strong feeling that so-and-so is not to be trusted, but are quite unable to articulate any reasons for that judgment, you might insist that those who deride your hunch are being “too rational”. Since hunches of this sort not infrequently turn out to be correct, however, you might retort that actually those who dismiss them outright are not being rational enough. The same might be said of someone whose idea of comforting a grieving friend is confined to urging a “stiff upper lip”, or pointing out that “life must go on”.
In a more theoretical vein, some philosophers have attacked the very idea that one can reason one’s way to solutions for life’s deepest problems. Telling examples of this last attitude are to be found in the attacks sustained by Richard Dawkins from thinkers who, while themselves acknowledged atheists, charge Dawkins’s dismissal of all religious faith with being simplistic. (Terry Eagleton’s reviews of Dawkins’s God Delusion, in which he describes him as a “card-carrying rationalist”, took this line, opining that “even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason” (Eagleton 2006).[1])
It might also be suggested that the very idea of positing an all-encompassing life goal such as happiness or the good life, which one then undertakes to pursue, is misguided hyper-rationality. Chance plays an ineliminable role in our lives, and any life plan drawn up so carefully as to leave nothing to chance is bound to fail. Yet in the light of my definition such a plan fails because it is delusive: it simply is not the most efficient way to secure happiness. Trusting oneself to respond spontaneously to serendipity just might be the better way. Again, then, the over-anxious planner is not being excessively rational, but not rational enough.
And then there are some wilder and grander rejections of rationality, as in Nietzsche’s “Why truth? Why not untruth?”, or the contention attributed to Sartre that even the acceptance of the law of non-contradiction is an arbitrary subjective free choice.
§ 2. Emotions and Reason
Emotions, it is widely believed, are the enemies of reason. While many of our emotions are swiftly triggered by and incorporate beliefs, they are not as easily extinguished if evidence is produced against the belief in which they are grounded. Emotions typically control the salience of perceptible or conceivable features of our environment. When in the grip of fear, or hope, or jealousy, or anger, we apprehend the world in very different ways; emotion highlights certain features and blocks out others. “Emotion skews the epistemic landscape” (Goldie 2008,159): when we are in the grip of passion, we are blinkered.
Blinkers have obvious disadvantages, but they also have their use. From the point of view of adaptive evolution, it is easy to see that the drawbacks of emotions are simply the reverse of their crucial function. By narrowing the range of facts to those most relevant to an urgent response, they spare us the need to deal with the “Frame problem” (Pylyshyn 1987). The Frame Problem consists in the fact that we cannot consider an indefinitely large amount of information concerning the potential consequences of any action we might take. Even if we could list all potentially relevant consequences of an action, the moment would have passed by the time we had done so. We must therefore, without reflection, choose what to ignore as currently irrelevant – but we must do so without deliberating about what to consider and what to ignore, lest we get trapped in an endless regress. So it seems we must either act rashly or get lost in precautionary reflections. The blinkers imposed by emotion control salience for us, and spare us that dilemma. In this way, they help to prepare the body for a quick response to a large range of situations likely to present themselves in most of our lives. [2]
Emotions are Janus-faced in yet another sense. Because they can be triggered by cognitions, and specifically by beliefs conveyed in explicit language, and because they involve feelings, emotions seem to form an important part of our conscious life. At the same time, however, they escape conscious control: “experience shows that those who are most agitated by their passions are not those who know them best” (Descartes 1984 §28).
In what follows, I propose to trace some of the ambiguity in the role that emotions play in our capacity to reason to the way in which they bridge what Daniel Kahneman (2011) has recently called “Thinking fast and slow”, or what is more commonly referred to as the hypothesis of “dual processing”. In the next section, I sketch the importance of that hypothesis.
§3.The Two-Track Mind
A moment’s reflection can attest that we know many things without knowing how. Retrieving trivial pieces of knowledge such as your mother’s maiden name, is an obvious example. More interesting is the disconcerting evidence suggesting that when faced with a moderately complex problem, we are sometimes better off not thinking about it explicitly, and allowing our unconscious thinking to decide the issue without the help of explicit calculations and reasoning. This has led some researchers, notably ApDijksterhuis, to suggest that there are two kinds of thinking, one of which is conscious and the other unconscious (Dijksterhuis and Nordgren 2006) . This is one of many forms taken by the hypothesis of the Two Track Mind, or Dual Processing. Keith Stanovich listed over 20 variants of this view in (Stanovich 2004,30), and I shall follow him in referring to the two tracks as the Intuitive and the Analytic, or simply S1 and S2.
The most important supporting observations for the Two Track Mind derive from the discovery of systematic modes of irrationality in reasoning: I shall turn to these in §4. But first, I note that the apparent power of unconscious thought, just noted, in itself constitutes a compelling motivating observation, particularly when joined to the realization of the surprising limitations of conscious awareness. In a classic paper, George Miller (1956) pointed out that our capacity for simultaneous attention to distinct items of thought or perception is extremely limited: Concentrating on seven unrelated items at once stretches most people’s powers. We deal with this limitation by “chunking”, which re-encodes complexes of related information into a single item –a regional code for a phone number, for example, may consist of 3 digits but is encoded as one “chunk”. While the “magical” character of the number seven (presumably offered tongue-in-cheek in the first place) has not proved robust (Baddely 1994), the limitations of conscious memory and attention have been well confirmed. It has therefore become apparent that any reasoning about even moderately complex matters inevitably relies on much processing that is inaccessible to consciousness.[3]
The narrowness of the immediate memory “channel” in “Global Work-space theory” (Baars 1997; 2002) confirms this first characteristic of one processing system and the requirement that something else be able to process information without being subject to similar limitations. Other contrasting characteristics of the two systems are handily summarised by Jonathan Evans, in an article that presents an authoritative summary of the state of the art on dual processes. (Evans notes, however, that “the attributes listed in Table 2 do not include emotion, the discussion of which is generally beyond the scope of this review.”(Evans 2008,257).)
[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
The contrasts listed in this table form a dauntingly large set, and it is far from obvious that the two columns really represent two unified systems, each containing all the features listed. Further, a single one of the contrasting pairs on the list may conceal a number of different distinctions. To take but the case of automaticity: Agnes Moors and Jan De Houwer have argued that this term and its contrast collect a number of relatively independent traits that don’t necessarily belong to a single “system” either in function or brain circuitry: “unintentional, uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven, unconscious, efficient, and fast” (Moors and De Houwer 2006). Some of these items already appear separately on Evans’s table. Moors rightly worries about the tangle of conceptual and empirical assumptions that underlie the assimilation of so many contrasts to two “systems”.
Nevertheless, when we consider all these contrasts in the light of evolution, there is considerable heuristic value in the idea of a Two Track Mind. The contrasts in Evans’s list reflect three very general facts about human beings: First, we are mammals, and share with other mammals adaptations that have established themselves over hundreds of millions of years. Mammals, including humans, are superb at multi-tasking and solving everyday problems of living without explicit or deliberate thought, and many of them come about in the course of maturation. Second, among those mammalian adaptations is the capacity to learn complex routines that begin with effortful conscious practice, become “overlearned”, and come to look and feel like reflexive routines.[4] Third, we have something that other mammals do not have, namely language. This involves both maturation and learning. Among other unique features, language enables us to make goals, belief and desires explicit, and to argue about them in such a way as to generate entirely new goals, beliefs and desires which could not have existed without the intervention of linguistic processing. The new potentialities that arise from our use of language interact with, and give rise to, a vast new repertoire of overlearned skills, beliefs, and values (de Sousa 2007).
Given these three characteristics, and given the importance of emotions in all aspects of our lives, it is worth asking what specific role emotions might play in our pursuit of epistemic goals.
§ 4. Emotions and Reasoning
What is an emotion? Most philosophers and psychologists would endorse something like the following definition of central cases of emotion, due to a leading psychologist:“an episode of interrelated, synchronised changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism.”(Scherer 2005,695). The five subsystems are 1) a cognitive component; 2) a motivational component; 3) a subjective phenomenological component, or feeling; 4) a physiological component, which works to prepare the body for a response in accordance (2); and 5) an expressive component.
Note that the first three components are generally available to consciousness. The fourth belongs rather to the sub-personal level of organization. As for the last, while generally available to consciousness, it functions to communicate, in a way that is only partly under the subject’s control. We might look at emotional expression as setting up a sort of arms race between the sender’s ability to control what is communicated and the receiver’s ability to detect states that the sender would prefer to conceal. Non-human mimicry in nature contains many examples of deceptive messages; and it has been argued that human intelligence, with the large brain that supports it, evolved as an essentially Machiavellian tool destined to facilitate the manipulation of others’ responses (Dunbar 2003). Since it is a familiar cliché that the emotions play a dominant role in the sort of rhetorical art that aspires to carry conviction without regard to truth, the point might be sharpened. That seems to be the brunt of the contention in (Mercier and Sperber 2011) that the real evolutionary drive behind the honing of our capacity for argument lies in the need to persuade others (and perhaps oneself) of one’s existing convictions, rather than in the establishment of truth. But that is not a line of argument I shall have time to pursue.