Opinion

It seems apparent that there are essentially two ways to think, or reason if you prefer. The pragmatic, unemotional, and more objective process, and the emotionally driven, subjective and often bias process. This also seems to be something that is leveraged by certain actors throughout society.

One could postulate that people are being encouraged to think more emotionally in place of more pragmatic reasoning to perpetuate an advantageous environment to be leveraged. There doesn’t have to be some big conspiracy, it can be no more than a common preference selected by powerful people to market to consumers, and keep those quarterly profits at record growth every month.

Notwithstanding the immense benefits of a captialist market, a free and open market that anyone can be a part of and build wealth; it seems clear that it has it’s issues. Namely that the human race, once called Homo Erectus, is now a product of the market, not so much a consumer. We have shifted focus so much that we are now a new species, Homo Economicus. Yes, it’s an actual thing!

As we digress we take a look at the core ways of reasoning and some of the factors at play.

Emotional reasoning

Being almost entirely subjective, and often very biased, and for good reason; emotional thinking is driven by emotional needs. The need to avoid offence, seen as rude etc, are amongst the main reasons people use this approach to reasoning.

While emotional thinking is valuable and useful, it must be kept in check and measured against the pragmatic postulations. It is imperative for the individual to be discerning in choosing which reasoning to apply in any given situation. Remember, no matter how you or anyone feels about it, fact is fact.

Deductive vs pragmatic reasoning

Made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, deductive reasoning is a process of gathering evidence, past events leading to, and forming a foregone conclusion. These conclusions are typically considered immutable, and should not change or be questioned.

Pragmatic reasoning is not too dissimilar in that we use the above process, but we extend it to factor in context, external influences, and any other information that may have causation to the subject. Also, very importantly, the conclusion reached is transient. We take it as our best educated guess that can and should be challenged, especially as new information comes to light.

Holding conflicting opinions

If one can acknowledge the subjective experience and emotional influence in reaching conclusions, then one might find oneself holding multiple differing opinions based on differing requirements or scenarios.

Let us consider what I’m sure most would agree to be the most extreme of situations a human being can find oneself in, a passing of life.

Let us consider this using the above methods of reasoning:

Deductively and emotionally, we might say we know this person and care for them, or we suppose we are someone that does.

This triggers an emotion, often a slew of them; sadness, anger, disappointment, depression, grief etc. Depending on the person and the situation, one may act on the emotion and decide to take retribution.

However, the pragmatic thinker kicks in and we decide not to take retribution because of the concequences to us.

Here we see both ways of reasoning working together in balance. It serves us to think emotionally so that we can express empathy and console our loved ones through the grief. We act on emotional thinking here because it’s advantageous to us and the people we care about.

However, let’s suppose we don’t know the person that has passed. Perhaps we have a decision to make that impacts many. If we were to act on our emotions, is that useful? Do we have a bias here that may restrict us from considering the needs of others?