Perhaps because I am already a philosopher, it does not strike me as news that reason is a tool we use to get around in our lives. It doesn’t motivate behavior; it doesn’t pose the problems we need to solve. It just helps us solve our problems so that we can behave. Hitler, for example, used reason to figure out how best to exterminate the Jewish people. Did we ever doubt that? Nevertheless, this non-news is the gist of Donald Calne’s recent book Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior. Reason is a skill we can and do use in our life.

This is disappointing, since the book advertisements are compelling: “Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have revolutionized our understanding of the human mind and human cognition. But what implications do these new findings have for the place of reason — long considered the crowning human faculty that assured transcendent purpose — in human life?” For those who kept up with scientific advancement in the twentieth century even only modestly, nothing Calne covers in his book remotely falls under the heading of breakthrough or revolutionary. Indeed, the science in which he embeds his rather pedestrian understanding of reason is by now quite well known, having already been endlessly discussed in popular literature. Surely, we all know by now that our psychologies are in some vague unspecified way tied to our evolutionary history and that our brains are fabulously complicated, somewhat modularized, parallel, distributed, and redundant. Yet such is the news Calne heralds.

Worse, he embeds his non-news regarding reason in larger discussions concerning language, ethics, commerce, government, religion, art, and psychology — the history of these items and what role reason allegedly plays in each. Right off one should notice that each topic is a series of dissertations unto itself, not merely a quick chapter. But quick chapters they are in his book, giving at best a whiff of the ideas behind them and even less regarding their connections to our capacities to reason.

While it is clear that Calne is well-read, it isn’t clear that he analyzes what he reads very well. Instead get cartoons of each of these topics, complemented by few key quotations from a major player or two in each arena, followed by a paragraph or two outlining what, if anything, reason has to do with it. Here is one example of what I am talking about. In his discussion on commerce, Calne notes that states’ methods of interacting with one another are changing. “Wars,” he tell us, “are the milestones of European history, yet this tradition is now fading as the nations of European Union move toward political federation” (p. 113). I am sure those in Bosnia would be interested to learn such things. His gloss on what relevance reason has to these (what I believe are false, but are at least disputable) facts is that “we look to the future with hope as we seek rational ways of dealing with new circumstances” (p. 113). Such does not inspire me to suggest that Calne perhaps move out of his current work in neurology and into the policy arena.

We regrettably find a second example in Calne’s very understanding of reason itself. He explains that reason is the tool we use to formulate arguments. So far, so good. The types of arguments we formulate are inductive and deductive. Inductive arguments are those that move from specific premises to general conclusions. What deductive arguments is left largely to the reader’s imagination. Anyone who has taken freshman logic should have had beaten into their system that inductive arguments are most assuredly not defined in terms of scope; they are those whose conclusion is likely to be true if the premises are true. Calne then conjoins these two argument types with Ockham’s Razor and what he called “Galileo’s Knife” in order to get reason in its full glory. Reason is forbidden from multiplying entities beyond explanatory necessity and then instructed to give observation priority over theory.

While I am dubious that Ockham’s Razor is part of what at least philosophers mean by reason, I am definitely certain that it doesn’t make sense to prize observation over theory. For, as many philosophers of science have reminded us for some time now, we can’t make any observations absent theory. In order to know that the swish in the cloud chamber indicates an electron, one has already to antecedently accepted a theoretical framework which links the apparatus in the lab to the theory under examination. Indeed, even to see the cloud chamber itself as a cloud chamber, we have to have already accepted theories regarding the existence of mid-sized objects. There isn’t any distinction between observation statements and theoretical ones.

The long and the short of my complaint is that Calne goes wide but not deep. This is a mistake, because it results in an uninformative and ill-informed book. I cannot recommend it.

Valerie Gray Hardcastle

Department of Philosophy

Program in Science and Technologies Studies

Virginia Tech

Valerie Gray Hardcastle is the author of The Myth of Pain, (MIT Press, 1999) and the editor of Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays (MIT Press, 1999).

Categories: Philosophical, General