Truth As Process

On the false dichotomy between reason and emotion

If I could change one widely held misconception, it would be the idea that there exist two fundamentally different ways of knowing: the rational or logical, on the one hand, and the emotional or intuitive, on the other.

This dichotomy has led to the belief that some ways of knowing — like science — deal only with logic, while others —like religion — primarily involve using emotion. In this way, reason becomes the key to understanding the natural world, while intuition (or spiritual energy) is how we make contact with the supernatural.

I reject this dichotomy. Not because I reject one of these two aspects of our thinking — the rational and the intuitive. But because emotion and reason are really two sides of the same coin.

The process of drawing an inference requires an emotional coefficient. And emotions, for their part, can be thought of as shortcuts that allow an individual to jump to an inference without having to go through the logical steps normally needed to establish it.

Let’s look first at how emotion is central to rational thinking. Then we’ll turn to the ways that emotions incorporate experience, allowing us to draw inferences without necessarily being aware of why we are drawing them. Finally, I’ll explain why science and religion actually have a lot more in common than is normally supposed. Both, I’ll argue, are primarily ethical in nature.

In the story, the Tortoise asks Achilles to think of the following logical syllogism, taken from Euclid’s Elements.

(A) Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this triangle are things which are equal to the same.

(Z) Therefore, the two sides of this triangle are equal to each other.

The Tortoise admits that most people will readily agree that Z follows from A and B. Even if they don’t think that either A or B is true, they would agree…

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