Problems+of+Reason,+Lateral+Thinking+and+Other+Thoughts

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 * Reason**, in our culture, is the privileged way of knowing. This has been the case since The Enlightenment of the 18th century and has roots that go back at least to Socrates and Plato.

====As far as certainty of **knowledge** goes, this privileging of reason is justified. We saw how our senses can deceive, we claim emotions can cloud our judgment, and how meaning of language can be concealed by vagueness and ambiguity. The benefits of reason are clear. It is able to give precise and direct answers, which are true in all situations. Rational information is either true or false – there is no seeming ambiguity about what constitutes a correct answer.====

In nearly every area of knowledge, the validity of knowledge is based on its rationality:

 * ====Mathematics: mathematical claims will be rejected out of hand if they do not pass tests of reason. 2 + 2 = 5. That is irrational.====
 * ====Natural sciences: scientific theories are rejected until one presents rational, empirical evidence to support a claim====
 * ====Human sciences: though lacking the precision of natural science, the human sciences seek to rationally explain human behavior. What good, for example, would microeconomic theory be if it applied to irrational beings who acted upon chance instead or good sense?====
 * ====History: the validity of a historical interpretation depends in large part on reason: do the arguments cohere? Do the facts correspond to reality? Is there empirical evidence to demonstrate the legitimacy of the arguments?====
 * ====The Arts: aha! An area of knowledge based not upon reason. But how often do we hear complaints about art that “doesn’t make any sense?” On the other hand, many an artist and many a critic claim that the decisions made in creating art, using art, and valuing it are are as much tied to reason as any other way of knowing.====
 * ====Ethics: we place a premium on the coherence (consistency) of ethical behavior. In other words, unethical man is often so because he is a hypocrite. Moreover, we often defend the ethics of a decision with syllogistic (deductive) reasoning. Killing is wrong. John killed. Therefore John is wrong.====

Weaknesses of Reason:
====The things we know that are logically true or false may be **arbitrary**. For example I might know with 100% certainty that is a man is a bachelor, then he must be an unmarried man. But this may not give us very much practical information; it doesn’t tell us much about bachelors in the real world. There are things a grandmother might tell her granddaughters about bachelors that might be informed by empiricism (perception) and emotion that are far more "true" and "valuable" to know. Furthermore, we have seen that Inductive reasoning can never be absolutely certain while Deductive reasoning can be certain, but relies on first principles (premises). If the premises are wrong, the reasoning will produce unsound conclusions. Then we have to deal with informal logic on a daily basis due to ignorance, laziness, pride, and prejudice.====

Strengths of Reason:
====With **deductive arguments**, our conclusions are already contained, even if implicitly, in our premises. This means that we don't arrive at new information — at best, we are shown information which was obscured or unrecognized previously. Thus, the real value in deduction is in the truth-preserving nature of deductive argument.==== ====**Inductive arguments**, on the other hand, do provide us with new ideas and thus may expand our knowledge about the world in a way that is impossible for deductive arguments to achieve. Thus, while deductive arguments may be used most often with mathematics, most other fields of research make extensive use of inductive arguments.====

Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that one can convincingly argue that reason is impossible without the other three ways of knowing as a foundation. Why?
= = =Lateral Thinking= Lateral thinking is reasoning that actively resists the logic errors. One way to express this is to "Think Outside the Box." It is based on a series of tools that challenge our ‘habits’ of thinking or our tendency to think in one way most, or even all of the time. click on image for source ====Dr. Edward de Bono is regarded by many as the leading world authority in the field of **creativity**. He is the inventor of the phrase **“Lateral Thinking”** which is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.====
 * ====Rational arguments take their form in language. Without language, we at the very least cannot communicate our reasons for thinking and acting the way we do.====
 * ====Often what we consider rational (not necessarily logical) has its roots not in reason, but emotion. (i.e. do not cheat on your partner because it makes your partner feel bad).====
 * ====Much of what we express in language, much of our emotions, and thus much of our rationality finds its basis in sensory experience. Empiricists (those who emphasise the role of experience/sense perception and evidence in acquiring knowledge), for example, argue that everything we know is ultimately based upon sense perception. There are no a priori (independent of experience) truths.====

There are a number of ways of describing or defining Lateral Thinking.

 * 1) ====**“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”** This means that trying harder in the same direction may not be as useful as changing direction. Effort in the same direction (approach) will not necessarily succeed.====
 * 2) ====**“Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perceptions instead of trying harder with the same concepts and perceptions.”** With logic you start out with certain ingredients just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces. But what are those pieces? In most real life situations the pieces are not given, we just assume they are there. We assume certain perceptions, certain concepts and certain boundaries. Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. Lateral thinking is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.====

Source:http://www.edwdebono.com/lateral.htm

In essence, Lateral Thinking uses a series of techniques that encourage "creative thinking" It is perhaps best here to look at some Lateral Thinking puzzles.
====Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don't tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. Obviously, there is usually more than one answer to any given puzzle, but, in general, only one solution is truly satisfying.====

Work on these puzzles alone or in pairs. //If you work alone//, read the puzzle/scenario and try to find the best answer to the puzzle.
====//If you work with a partner,// you look at the answer, then read just the clues to your friends. Your friends must determine the answer by asking questions about it, which you may answer only with yes, no, or doesn't matter. You can adjust the difficulty of the puzzle by varying the initial clues, throwing in red herrings, and so forth.====

The scenarios given on this page are realistic, if unlikely. The clues can all be taken at face value, although that's not to say their implications can't be misleading.

 * A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator -- or if it was raining that day -- he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his apartment.


 * In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby


 * A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold and jewels on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large open window.


 * A man and his wife raced through the streets. They stopped, and the husband got out of the car. When he came back, his wife was dead, and there was a stranger in the car.


 * A body is discovered in a park in Chicago in the middle of summer. It has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia.


 * A woman has incontrovertible proof in court that her husband was murdered by her sister. The judge declares, "This is the strangest case I've ever seen. Though it's a cut-and-dried case, this woman cannot be punished."


 * A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out.


 * A hunter aimed his gun carefully and fired. Seconds later, he realized his mistake. Minutes later, he was dead.


 * A man is returning from Switzerland by train. If he had been in a non-smoking car he would have died.


 * A man goes into a restaurant, orders albatross, eats one bite, and kills himself.

=Is the kind of thinking encouraged here useful? Useful for what?=