Reason And Abduction Essay

In this post-Enlightenment society, reason is touted as an absolute source of knowledge, while emotion is painted negatively, prone to subjectivity and relativity. However, though subjectivity plays a major role in both ways of knowing, its value is determined by the type of knowledge covered.
Despite seeming like a bulwark of absolutes, reason is still prone to subjectivity, which must be taken into account. This is an issue in induction, which not only makes conclusions but also creates premises for deduction and influences abduction, permeating every part of reason. With induction, specific observations lead to generalizations, which are judged based on their probability of being true. However, this process is riddled with room for subjectivity.

For example, confirmation bias leads to unconforming data being filtered out of the conclusion, an example of which can be found in Dr. Glenn’s father, who only seems to notice bad drivers when they are of a certain people group (James Glenn, TOK Class). In addition, the availability heuristic can cause strong inductive arguments to be wrong because there is unavailable information, seen in how British biologists believed there were no black swans because they hadn’t seen Australian black swans. In both of these cases, the obtaining of data is skewed by subjectivity in the individual’s viewpoint, whether it be in the form of personal beliefs or geographic location. However, the conclusion drawn can also be tainted by subjectivity, since induction relies on patterns and people experience different patterns. For example, speaking loudly is associated with anger in Western culture, but in some Asian cultures, angry people speak more quietly. This leads some Western people to misinterpret individual loud Asians as angry and induce that people in Asia are

Unlike reason, emotion is inherently subjective, an aspect seen in the strangeness of the phrase “objective emotion.” Like the role of subjectivity in acquiring data in reason, our backgrounds completely affect the way we feel, seen in how most modern people would be horrified at medieval punishments such as the breaking wheel while a contemporary wouldn’t think it strange (“The Long Reach of Reason”). These emotions feed into our biases (not to be confused with cognitive biases), which may be a problem when reason is the standard, but when emotion is used as a guideline, these biases are beneficial. Knowledge of our likes and dislikes are determined based on how we feel when confronted with certain things, and many of our everyday decisions are made using emotion because there may not be a logical reason to choose a certain option, a situation I often encounter when trying to decide which of my grey shirts to wear, avoiding “analysis paralysis,” the inability to make decisions because of an over-reliance on emotion. This mental paralysis is seen in the case of “Elliot,” a patient whose life fell apart because he was unable to make decisions with emotion (Lagemaat). Even more importantly, emotions give us knowledge about our own identity, shown in how people describe personalities using emotions. In addition, emotion takes advantage of