The Role Of Reason In Human Behaviour

by Carlo Fonseka
 
"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that … had power changed hands [at the presidential election in January] the Rajapaksa brothers would have been dead along with quite a few like myself…’ - (Extract from Political Watch, Sunday Island 3 October 2010)

(October 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Question: Which one of the following does the above statement express?

A A fact

B A belief

C A truth

D An item of knowledge

E All of the above

In order to answer this question in a systematic way, I re-read Chapter 11 titled Fact, Belief, Truth and Knowledge in Bertrand Russell’s book called Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits (1948). What follows draws heavily from this book.

What is a fact?

A fact is something which is really there in the world. For example, the sun is a fact; Ruwanveliseya is a fact; that I have a runny nose is a fact; that Political Watch (PW) made the statement quoted above is a fact. If power changed hands and what PW stated came true, that would have constituted another fact. (Perish the very thought!) What he said did not become a fact only because power did not change hands in January 2010. Had power changed hands and the Rajapaksa brothers and PW were not killed by SF, PW’s statement would have been falsified. As Bertrand Russell points out, ‘facts’ are what makes statements true or false. By this criterion, PW’s statement to the effect that had power changed hands, the Rajapaksa brothers and PW would be dead is not a fact. Then, is it a belief?

What is a belief?

A belief is really a state of the brain that prepares the body for a kind of behavior appropriate to what is believed. Beliefs certainly influence and often determine behaviour. Because PW believed that SF would have killed him after the election, he contemplated fleeing the country but did not do so because another belief determined his behaviour. That belief was that power would not change hands in January 2010. Thus PW’s statement quoted above clearly represents a belief the appropriate response to which was inhibited by another belief. The next question that arises is whether PW’s belief about being done in by SF was a true belief. This leads to the famous question: What is truth?

What is truth?

PW’s statement (I have absolutely no doubt…myself) is the expression of a belief. To make it a true belief something had to happen, namely, the Rajapaksa brothers and PW had to be killed by SF. This did not happen. Therefore did his original belief about being killed by SF represent a truth? A little thought suffices to show that the truth of a given belief is determined by certain facts causally related to, but separate from the belief itself. PW’s belief which anticipated death at SF’s hands did not turn out to be true. However, the belief was not proved to be false because the critical condition necessary for it to be proved true or false, namely, power changing hands did not materialize. Had SF become president and proceeded to kill PW, his belief would have been a true belief. On the other hand, had SF become president and not proceeded to kill PW, his belief would have been a false one. Therefore PW’s belief remained just a belief without becoming a truth or falsehood. This leads to the question whether PW’s statement represented an item of definite knowledge. In other words is his statement equivalent to saying "I know that SF would have killed the Rajapaksa brothers and me if power changed hands". To answer this question, we have to be clear about what constitutes true knowledge.

What is knowledge?

There is agreement in science that three conditions must be fulfilled before one can legitimately claim to know something.

1. It must be true.

2. One must be sure that it is true on the basis of some evidence.

3. One must have the right to be sure it is true.

The question we have to ask is whether PW’ s original statement satisfies these conditions. We have already realized that PW’s statement that had SF become president he would have killed him and the Rajapaksa brothers is neither a fact nor a truth. It is a belief. It is a belief about the truth of which he for one is absolutely sure. The epistemological question we have to ask is whether he has the right to be sure. I do not think he has. Who knows, as an army man SF may have uttered those threats as a strategy just to encourage his nervous supporters fighting a losing battle. In any case, how would a physiologist analyze the problem?

Physiological analysis

The basic tool of physiological analysis is the stimulus-response concept. A stimulus is a change in the environment that elicits a response or reaction. In the present case, some words (sound waves) emitted by SF entered PW’s ears and generated nerve impulses which reached his brain and induced in it a state that prepared his body for what physiologists call the ‘fight or flight response’. But this response did not manifest itself. Instead it led to what a physiologist would call ‘a suspended response’. Let me clarify this with an analogy. Suppose a cat is watching at a mouse-hole in the belief that there is a mouse in the hole. This belief in the cat’s brain prepares its body to pounce upon the mouse if and when it appears. That is to say, the cat is in a state of ‘suspended response’ induced by the state of its brain. If the mouse appears, the cat’s belief would be a true one and it would pounce on the mouse and kill it and eat it. If there was no mouse in the hole, the belief would have been a false one and its suspended response would have been a mistake. But in both cases, the body had been prepared for the appropriate response.

What is true of the cat’s behavior in this example applies to much of our everyday behavior. In real life, ‘knowledge’ consists essentially of preparation for delayed or suspended reactions. We talk of knowledge only when our ‘suspended or delayed’ reactions turn out to be dependably successful implying that they were related to the facts of the situation we were reacting to. What we are witnessing at present in the form of courts martial may well be the working out of ‘suspended reactions’ induced in various people during those hectic do-or-die days. It must be remembered that beliefs, true or false, provoke behavior appropriate or inappropriate. Fortunately the human brain has the capacity to analyze the very behavior it mediates.

Role of Reason

Our brain – the seat of our Reason – is the organ with which we think, we think. In other words, the human brain can think about itself as it is thinking about something. We owe this to our highly evolved capacity for reasoning. In relation to any response we have the capacity to ask whether it was or is an appropriate one. In this way reasoning can be deployed to consider whether the way we are judging and treating other people, other cultures and other claims on a given occasion is the most appropriate way and for exploring better ways of judging and treating them. Moreover, we can also reason about errors we commit, with the aim of not repeating them. For example, by reasoning the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe has reached the conclusion that his nation should be determined never to wage another war. It so happens that the Buddhist approach to reality depends overwhelmingly on reasoning. Because the culture of this country is essentially Buddhist, I believe that reason should play a much bigger role in guiding our destiny than it appears to be doing at present.