Narrative Rationality

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumBeyond order, beyond the human Unruly socionatures and contested politics Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Melissa LeachMelissa LeachInstitute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorraine Daston’s short, eloquent book makes a compelling set of arguments. To summarize my reading, she contends that order in nature provides a model for order in human society; that across a diversity of cultural and historical settings, people have looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior and moral reasoning. This happens through diverse mechanisms through which different aspects of nature—glossed as the specific, the local, and the universal—are called upon to justify or decry particular human behaviors. It also happens generically—order in nature providing the basis against which the very idea of normativity in human society is justified and calibrated. Disruptions and disorder in nature—especially if caused by instances of human immorality—invoke deep passion, whether wonder, horror, or terror. While particular disruptions, as nature “bites back” in revenge, are of concern in themselves, they also hint at a possible descent into generic disruption and disorderliness, a chaos in nature which presages a chaos in human society, as normativity is abandoned. Daston joins an array of philosophers in problematizing this pervasive tendency. She argues that appeals to natural order are contingent, not necessary; that they are a product of human cognition (put another way, they are socially constructed). Thus, she concludes, such appeals are fundamentally a matter of human reasoning, and we should recognize this: “human reason in human bodies is the only kind of reason we have.”This is an interesting and timely thesis, good to think with as we grapple with our histories, current predicaments, and future worlds. As a social anthropologist and interdisciplinary, engaged researcher long interested in how people understand, live with, and represent human relations with nonhuman natures across a diversity of places and issues, there is much that strikes home. Yet three issues bother me. First is an underplaying of politics—who precisely appeals to order in nature, what political work do these constructions do, and what alternatives are excluded? Second, is nature really so ordered—and if it is actually more unruly, where does this leave appeals to natural order as a means to calibrate human behavior? Third, is humanity really so separate from nonhuman nature—and if relations are more entangled and co-constructed, where does this leave the possibility of an exclusively human reasoning? Let me elaborate briefly on each of these concerns.The modeling of social norms on apparent natural orders has been everywhere in my work. In ethnographic engagements with Kissi people in Guinea, West Africa, “maa,” transgressing social norms such as having sex in the bush or burying a deceased pregnant woman without removing her fetus, is argued by elders to mix inappropriately parts of human, plant, and animal reproductive orders, disrupting both with devastating consequences—crop failure, societal infertility. In the same region, deforestation of once pristine landscapes, contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss, is portrayed by scientists, policymakers, and sometimes villagers themselves as a disruption to balanced equilibrium between forest societies and ecologies (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Turning to issues of human health, tropes of disrupted balance with nature also recur. So we find the origins of the West African Ebola epidemic attributed to the zoonotic spillover of a virus from a bat to so-called patient zero, a small boy playing near a tree in a Guinean village: a symptom of disruption to the balanced harmony that had kept human habitation and activity separate from pristine, bat-inhabited natural forest. The spillover in Wuhan, China perhaps at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, has been represented as a revenge by nature for our unregulated “wet markets” and intensive, industrialized food systems.In these examples and others, it is particular people and groups who are making claims about disrupted balance, in narratives that attribute blame and shore up authority and interests. Thus, and to put it too briefly and instrumentally, claims about sex in the bush by wayward youth support Kissi elders in their attempts to exert authority over the young, and control over their labor. The young men and women so blamed find their freedoms constrained. Narratives about disrupted harmony in deforested landscapes support state and international projects to enclose “relic” forest islands from supposedly ecosystem-destroying small farmers. Such narratives occlude the knowledge and experience of farmers and villagers, for whom forest islands are anthropogenic, shaped and enriched by their own actions and practices, suggesting very different rights and claims. Narratives about human disruption to wildlife as a cause of zoonotic disease easily support the closing and closing-off of wildlife habitats and markets, undermining the livelihoods of land users and traders. COVID-19 has further spurred environmental and conservation agencies in their call for a “new deal” to address “the urgent need to fix our unbalanced relationship with nature”; deals that could support state and commercial interests in “green grabbing” wildlife habitats. Yet as they seek to counter these, in struggles for land and resource ownership, indigenous peoples and user rights activists themselves sometimes call on images of balance and their unique role in upholding it. They may also articulate quite different views of human-nature relations, associated with different social and political relationships—as I indicate later.In our current era, the tropes of balance and harmony in nature have gone multiscalar, extending to the global. Their use here is also profoundly political, as imagery of natural orders disrupted is deployed by governments, international agencies, and activists to support diverse purposes and claims. In the so-called Anthropocene humans are seen as the main drivers of earth system processes at the planetary scale, as manifested in discussions of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics. Scientific and policy discourses around “planetary boundaries” and “planetary health” argue for a resteering of societal change within acceptable natural limits to avoid future turbulence and disruption. They support aspirations for control—to redress the balance and avoid dangerous tipping points—and the power of the aspirant controllers, be they earth system scientists, planners and managers, technology companies, or the alliances between them.Across all these issues and scales, then, appeals to nature’s order—and the panic and responses when that order is disrupted—are part of political struggle, involving contestations over both material power and resources, and over whose claims and knowledge counts. Assuming appeals to nature’s order to be a generic human proclivity, and discussing this primarily as a matter of moral philosophy, glosses over these often visceral, high-stakes politics. It also detracts attention from the deeper, structural political-economic drivers of the actions seen to disrupt nature—in industrialized commercialized systems and values around production, consumption, and mobility. For example, while the likelihoods of zoonotic disease spillover may indeed be increased in farmers’ markets with multiple wild animals in close proximity and unsanitary conditions (the Wuhan story), we must ask how such conditions emerge: what are the politics of regulation in such places; who makes use of such markets; how are animals hunted, captured, and farmed, for whom, and so on? Wild resources have long been harvested and been central to diets across the world. Treating “wet markets” as a smoking gun for zoonotic spillover obscures the real drivers and leaves them unaddressed. So like Daston I would problematize appeals to nature’s order as particular, selective representations, but would wish to extend her argument to address more fully the contested politics and politics of knowledge in play.The idea of “natural order” is also problematic. Nature is never just nature. What we might think of as nature is always and already shaped by entanglements of processes that involve human action. This applies to landscapes—as the so-called wilderness of a park or a forest turns out to be an anthropogenic landscape shaped through histories of farming and settlement. It applies to species—as novelist and art critic Huysmans explored in an 1884 book also titled Against nature, the flowers chosen for depiction by painters frequently select the aesthetic of a highly bred bloom, a rose shaped by human action for size and color. It extends to the planet, where the implication of Anthropocene thinking is that earth system and atmospheric processes are co-constructed with human action. Put another way, natures are socionatures, constructed through pathways that intertwine human, animal, plant (and technological) practices in diverse assemblages. Moreover, such (socio) natures are highly dynamic. Their pathways of change are rarely linear, but as diverse perspectives in the sciences of complexity confirm, more often involve state shifts, contingent effects, and nonequilibria which render them disorderly. Daston’s claim that “natural orders are, in effect, more orderly than human orders, which may offer a clue as to why natural orders are invoked to buttress human orders and not vice versa” thus seems doubtful. She admits that “in an age of genetic engineering and anthropogenic climate change this imbalance of power may be shifting in the opposite direction” (p. 69). Yet disorderliness in (socio) natures is not new; nonequilibria, unruliness, and uncertainties have long been appreciated, whether by climate historians and paleoecologists documenting abrupt shifts in past lake levels and forest extents, or pastoralists living with and adapting to nonequilibrial rangeland ecologies. In such circumstances, aspirations to control nature to maintain or restore balance may be illusory at best. And if natures are socionatures and unruliness rules, where does this leave “natural orders” as a baseline for human normativity? Perhaps—to follow Daston—just in the realm of representation; certainly it sharpens their represented quality. But to leave it there obscures critical aspects of experience, practice, and politics in living with unruly socionatures, and may close off alternatives that we need to thrive in current and future worlds.If nature is never just nature, is the human always just human? Is human reasoning always and only practiced in human bodies as Daston suggests? “Maa” for the Kissi is not a social disturbance of a natural order, but a socionatural disturbance to socionatural orders in which human, plant, and animal vitality are inextricably intertwined. As explored in the growing fields of multispecies ethnography (e.g., Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Muenster 2015; Lock 2018) and “more than human” geography (Dowling, Lloyds, and Suchet-Pearson 2017), human lives are intimately entangled with all living things, their dynamism and agency, whether in bodies, homes, communities, ecologies, or planetary and cosmological worlds. These interrelationships are often intimate, affective, emotional, and embodied. They are important to people’s individual and collective senses of themselves, their identities, and appropriate behavior. For Guinean villagers bats are part of intimate home life; forest islands embed connections with ancestors and the continuity of settled sociality; and the kola trees planted within them over the buried umbilical cords of children embody something of their personalities and identities. Intersecting with advances in ecological and animal science that recognize modes of intelligence and communication among plants and animals, with each other and with humans, these perspectives in effect redefine humanity as part of nature, or at least as part of interconnected socionatural networks or assemblages (Haraway 2016) that question the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman—or at least render those boundaries contingent and negotiable.It is critical to avoid “othering” such perspectives into so-called indigenous societies and cultures. While understandings of human-nonhuman natures as deeply, intimately interconnected, and the importance of these to human thriving and identity are sometimes most obviously found among people living further from centers of global power whether in West Africa, the Amazon, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond, they are by no means confined to them. Among Maori people today, for instance, the dynamic agency that entwines human and nonhuman action extends to views of morality and rights, and court cases involving trees and rivers as claimants and rights-holders are commonplace. But there are plenty of similar cases in European history (the celebrated trial of a pig for murder in fifteenth-century Britain is a well-documented example: see Cohen 1986; Sullivan 2013). And were we to think that these are outdated notions of the past, look at the ways people in so-called modern industrial societies relate to their pets (Haraway 2003), accuse particular dogs of viciousness or attacks, engage with the plants in their gardens or the animal life in cities, or seek to protect particular individual trees from road developments. In such examples, elements of nonhuman nature prove to have personalities and communicative capacities, and people develop intimate connections with them that are important to their humanity. It may also be arrogant to suggest that only human beings reason, represent, and communicate, and other species do not. From Lewis Henry Morgan’s early studies of beavers’ reasoning, to an array of contemporary works on animal communication, this is a frontier area of study in anthropology which at the same time displaces its “anthro” centrism. “Human” reasoning, it follows, may actually be practiced not just in human bodies but in reciprocally constituted human and nonhuman natures.In our current era, disconnection and rupture of such intimate relations between human and nonhuman natures has become a pervasive problem. Such disconnections emerge when modern Cartesian scientific and industrial cultures divide the human and the nonhuman. We see this in many realms, including—to follow my themes here—when mainstream economics and environmental policy redefine nature as generalized “environment,” “biodiversity,” or “natural capital,” separate from humans and thus able to be commoditized, priced, or exploited. In this vein, more intertwined perspectives on human-nonhuman natures bring an important critique and counter to current views of nature as a provider of “ecosystem services,” as well as of current market logics in environmental governance for conservation and sustainability, which tend to disaggregate nonhuman natures into discrete units to which monetary value can attach (Sullivan 2013). There is a politics and political economy to such separations and, again, some gain while others lose. We must ask whether current predicaments—whether around environment, health, or in other domains—are well served by these disconnections, or whether they might be better served by reweaving our intimate, caring connections with nonhuman natures in all their characters and capabilities.Greater attention to the socionatural shaping and mutuality that characterize relations between human and nonhuman natures, to the unruliness and disorder that often pervade these, and to the power-laden processes through which certain versions of these complex assemblages are selected and deployed, are more extensions and elaborations of Daston’s thesis than fundamental contradictions of it. However they do shift the balance, asking us to interrogate more fully the power and implications of dominant representations that call on natural order, and to address more fully whom and what they exclude. This in turn offers the prospect of enriching this philosophical anthropology through dialogue with emerging perspectives in other fields, from political and cultural anthropology to political economy and ecology. And it takes us to a scholarly position which is less “against nature,” than continuing to engage, actively and robustly, with the plurality of ways our multispecies, more-than-human relations are constructed, represented, and lived.ReferencesCohen, Esther. 1986. “Law, folklore and animal lore.” Past and Present 110 (1): 6–37.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDowling, Robyn, Kate Lloyds, and Sandra Suchet-Pearson. 2017. “Qualitative methods II: ‘More-than-human’ methodologies and/in praxis.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (6): 823–31.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African landscape: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHaraway, Donna. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHuysmans, J.K. 1884. Against nature. London: Penguin Classics.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLock, Margaret 2018. “Mutable environments and permeable human bodies.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24 (4): 449–74.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLocke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. “Multispecies ethnography.” Oxford bibliographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSullivan, Sian. 2013. “Nature on the move III: (Re)countenancing an animate nature.” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 6 (1–2) : 50–71.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMelissa Leach is a social anthropologist, Professor and Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. She has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa while engaging with scientific, policy, and public discourses and debates around health, sustainability, and development. Her book publications include a trilogy of works with James Fairhead questioning deforestation discourses (Cambridge, 1996; Routledge, 1998; Cambridge, 2003), Epidemics (edited with Sarah Dry, Routledge, 2010), and The politics of green transformations (edited with Ian Scoones and Peter Newell, Routledge, 2015). She is currently leading a Collaborative Award on Pandemic Preparedness funded by Wellcome Trust.Melissa Leach[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716593 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A common view in philosophy is that the way human beings reason is not only gradually better, but that our way of reasoning is fundamentally distinctive. Findings in the psychology of reasoning challenge the traditional view according to which human beings reason in accordance with the laws of logic and probability theory, but rather suggest that human reasoning consists in the application of domain specific rules of thumb similar to those that we ascribe to some intelligent non-human animals as well. However, this view on human reasoning is unable to explain human accomplishments like technological innovations or scientific progress. David Papineau offers a theory of human theoretical rationality that is consistent with the psychological view on human reasoning but that can also explain how humans sometimes are able to transcend the limitations of their biologically quick and dirty modes of thought and thereby reach a high level of accuracy. Papineau claims that the abilities that constitute theoretical rationality are unique to the human species and thus, that human reasoning is fundamentally distinctive after all. In this paper I am going to discuss to what extent these abilities in fact are unique to our species and whether this theoretical rationality can be called an anthropological difference.

Bayani, Burhani and Irfani epistemology is a part of philosophy that is integrated with sources of interpretive methods. So it is necessary to explore and examine the relevance of Islamic epistemology in analyzing exegetical methods. This research is qualitative descriptive research using a library research approach based on literary sources, journal articles and books related to research. The purpose of this study is to classify the dimensions of tafsir studies that have been devoted by mufasir in contributing to Islamic thought through the holy book of the Qur'an. Bayani, Irfani and Burhani epistemology is a characteristic of Arabic research that originates directly from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and tabi'in. The integration of the Bayani epistemology with the interpretation method is in the historical aspect of bī al-ma'sūr, namely examining the meaning of the message through the text. Meanwhile, Burhani epistemology in its integration with the method of interpretation from the perspective of bī ar-ra'yi, namely revealing messages conveyed through human reason and rational reasoning. Meanwhile, Irfani epistemology reveals the method of interpretation through the al-Isyārī method, namely understanding the message through the intuition of each person's ability after carrying out the stages that go through to obtain intuition (the science of kasyf).

Critical thinking is a rich, dynamic, complex concept that entails bringing the most appropriate and highest standards for thought to bear upon the intrinsic (and frequently flawed) reasoning that occurs in the human mind, in order to reason at the highest levels. Critical thinking, in its explicit form, requires disciplining one's own thinking, as well as understanding and evaluating others' thinking, by focusing deliberately on the components present in all human reasoning. It requires developing executive-level functioning, in which the mind examines and re-examines its own thought by reasoning about its thinking to improve its reasoning. An early 1980s quote, often repeated by Richard Paul, that captures this point in a catchy phrase is: 'thinking about your thinking while you're thinking to improve your thinking'. This entails identifying and examining any errors or problems in the components, or elements, of reasoning, and correcting flaws by employing criteria appropriate in a given context. This systematic process, daily and routinely applied, should increasingly improve one's reasoning abilities over time. This in turn should lead to progressively more insightful levels of self-awareness on the part of the reasoner and, were it to be taken seriously on a broad scale, on the species itself. Critical thinking should lead to a world in which the majority of people, through their thinking, are able to make meaningful contributions and find contentment, despite the many complexities we face. Critical thinking arises from the need to intervene in the mistaken, irrational, and self-deceptive reasoning pervasive in human societies, which requires cultivating traits of mind, as well as skills and abilities. Critical thinking entails getting underneath and examining social norms, conventions, and taboos to determine the extent to which they are logical and reasonable. It might be noted that not every critical thinking theoretician accepts or advances the importance of ethical reasoning in critical thinking. Yet critical thinking as a serious field of study would guide reasoners to embrace and develop within themselves intellectual as well as ethical virtues that gradually improve and enhance their character as fair-minded persons; this follows from the ethical obligations all people face in living a human life. Critical thought differs in logic from any other field in that it attempts to understand thought itself – what thought entails, and where it goes wrong; it attempts this, in part, by uncovering, examining, and appreciating the many ways in which skilled, committed, passionate human thought leads to a more reasonable world, as well as the many ways in which confusions, delusions, and deceptions in human thought lead to a less reasonable world. In its highest manifestations, critical thinking searches for understandings and practices that advance life on the planet. In short, critical thinking is separate from, but necessary to, every subject, discipline, profession, or arena of human life that entails reasoning; this includes virtually every domain of life, to some degree, since reasoning is naturally occurring in the mind. Critical thinking searches for patterns of intrinsic neurotic and pathological reasoning that impede our capacities for criticality, logical thought, and reasonability. Critical thinking seeks to understand human reasoning as a system of ideas intimately connected with other fundamental functions of the human mind, namely emotions and desires (the affective dimension). Because thinking coexists in relationship with feelings and the human will, critical thinking theoreticians attempt to understand the concomitant relationships among thinking, emotions, and desires, and to uncover the conceptual tools most useful in improving not only cognition, or thinking, but also emotions and desires. Critical thinking is meant to be pre-eminently practical; it seeks to establish and develop universal concepts and principles about human thought essential to advanced reasoning in any field of study. By improving reasoning, these universal principles are essential as well to improving human life. In sum, guiding conceptual principles for human reasoning, and hence human life, are explored, established, and cultivated through the field of critical thinking studies. Critical thinking advances freedom of thought, which presupposes freedom of speech. This follows precisely because freedom of speech is required if humans are to openly and unreservedly explore thought without fear of reprisal or punishment, and if they are to best explore the many various and frequently complex implications of thought. Critical thinking helps explore all domains important to living a fulfilling life, including the psychological, social, economic, ecological, zoological, historical, scientific, literary, sexual, artistic, civic, and political. And critical thinking is essential to the cultivation of the educated mind (see Education). Historically, a number of important theoreticians have contributed to a shared conception of critical thinking. These include theoreticians reaching back in time before the use of the term critical thinking, as well as those theoreticians who began articulating an explicit concept of critical thinking in the 1970s and 80s. For instance, some of the roots of contemporary critical thinking began in the early part of the twentieth century, from fields such as logical positivism, analytic philosophy, and semantics. Many of the latter theoreticians came from philosophy departments, primarily those interested in formal logic, informal logic, and argumentation. Beginning in the 1970s and moving through the 1980s and 90s, various fields of study began to contextualise and develop aspects of critical thinking at differing levels of quality. The most comprehensive and integrated approach to critical thinking was developed by Richard Paul (1937–2015) and continues with the writings and teaching of scholars working in the Paulian tradition. Paul's approach is distinguished from other critical thinking theories chiefly because it offers the most comprehensive, integrated approach to critical thinking, is it essential to reasoning through the questions and problems in academic and professional disciplines, and is based in ordinary languages. Paul argues for living the examined life, in connection with the thinking of Socrates. Paul's framework establishes first principles in critical thinking that may be derived from the theory he constructed, distilled, and developed. Notably, Paul emphasises ethical reasoning as essential to critical reasoning, the importance of deliberate self-cultivation in advancing one's own intellectual character, and the universals in reasoning applicable across all domains of thought, subjects, and disciplines.

Reasoning is the most important human brain operation that leads to creative methodologies, algorithms and deductions giving way to sustainable research and development. Since the basis of reasoning in the Artificial Intelligence’s expert systems is human notions and concepts, the success of those systems depends upon the correspondence between human reasoning and their formalization. The paper at hands studies human reasoning in general and scientific thinking in particular with the help of the theory of finite Markov chains. Examples are also presented illustrating the applicability of the developed Markov chain models to real life situations.

The Indonesian film industry has experienced rapid development with the presence of various films that are not only entertaining, but also full of social values ​​and messages. The film Onde Mande! is one of the films that highlights the richness of Minangkabau culture while containing social values ​​in a light and entertaining narrative. This study aims to analyze the narrative structure and social values ​​in the film Onde Mande! using the narrative theory approach of Tzvetan Todorov and Walter Fisher. Todorov's theory is used to analyze the storyline into three stages, namely balance, disturbance, and equilibrium. Meanwhile, Fisher's theory emphasizes the importance of meaning, narrative rationality (coherence and fidelity), and moral truths believed by the audience. The results of this study indicate that the narrative structure of the film Onde Mande! follows the pattern of initial balance, disturbance, and new balance. The narrative is delivered coherently, emotionally touching, and has a moral message. This film also depicts the social values ​​of the Minangkabau people, such as mutual cooperation, responsibility, sincerity, deliberation, and devotion to family and culture. Thus, this film is not only entertainment, but also contributes to communication studies, especially in the narrative analysis of films based on Indonesian culture.

After reading Mercier and Sperber's article (2011), I have two questions in mind: Why do humans reason sometimes, and why do they avoid doing it other times? Let me critically examine Japanese culture as a case in point within two questions. Mercier and Sperber assume that humans reason, but I suspect that humans sometimes do reason and avoid doing it other times. To begin with, authors are right in their agreement with Dawkins and Krebs. Mercier and Sperber directly quote Dawkins and Krebs: Reasoning enables people to exchange arguments that, on whole, make communication more reliable and hence more advantageous .... For communication to be stable, it has to benefit both senders and receivers; otherwise they would stop sending or stop receiving, putting an end to communication itself. (as cited in Mercier & Sperber, 2011, p. 60) Following their own logic, where arguing is considered unbeneficial by senders and receivers, it might function to prevent us from producing reasonable beliefs based on critical reasoning. Given 2011 Greater East Japan Earthquake, I want to think about why Japanese sometimes reason and other times avoid doing so. Arguing or engaging in critical reasoning is a modern act, but old traditions die hard. One such example is kotodama: [A] belief, reflected in earliest Japanese sources, that a sacred power or spirit dwells in of traditional Japanese language. Particularly when expressed in certain forms, such as norito (ritual prayers) or waka poetry, it was believed that of Japanese language could exert a special influence on people, gods, and even course of world. Extreme care thus needed to be taken with to utilize their power properly, for good or for ill. Although notion is similar to beliefs in magical power of found in most traditional societies, it has been employed by some modern Japanese thinkers to explain what they believe are special characteristics of Japanese language and culture. (Campbell & Noble, 1993, p. 834) Although kotodama is a pre-modern concept, it still influences or even controls Japanese people. Izawa (1995) explains that in world where kotodama rules, there is no freedom to choose since they are divided into words inviting good and words inviting bad (p. 24). In such a world, to use a word is to realize what it means at same time. It is called kotoage, or realization of what mean. We are supposed to pray (or wish) for good results to come true not because everything will come true. Therefore, only good kotoage shall be permitted, and bad kotoage shall not be. I do not mean to argue that there are no English expressions against bad or fallacious reasoning. But phrases are rather caveats regarding uncritical reasoning or unsupported claims. For instance, wishy-washy means not having clear and firm ideas or beliefs. Crying wolf indicates frequent lying would decrease speaker's credibility. Whereas doomsayer is a pejorative against person whose perspective is overly pessimistic, self-fulfilling prophecy could have a positive connotation to make one's desire true. They do not serve a social role to discourage or hinder argumentation per se, and, thus, they are qualitatively different from kotodama notion. As a result, Japanese are not trained to argue and reason (Suzuki, 2008). For example, so-called power village, or genshiryoku mura, constructed safety myth of nuclear power plants. According to Daily Yomiuri, it is the nickname for a tight circle of government entities, utilities, manufacturers and others involved in promotion of nuclear power who believe nuclear plants are safe and reject out of hand any opposing views (Nuclear, 2011, p. 1). Thus, despite 1979 Three Mile Island accident in United States and 1986 Chernobyl accident in Soviet Union, nuclear power village maintained that Japanese power plants are fail-safe. …

The principle of autonomy is the first principle among four Bioethics principles which for the first time in Nuremberg Declaration and after Nazis felonies in mandatory adaption for researches and dangerous tests, it was concerned as a code and guideline of Ethics in research and treatment and afterwards it was affirmed in supplementary declarations and post declaration and international cultural & Bioethics documents and finally it was opened by two western philosophers of Ethics, Beauchamp & Childress and was presented as the first principle of four principles of Bioethics to be a guidance for researchers and physicians dealing with the patients and human subjects. Since there is a reliable bound between jurisprudence and Ethics in the Islamic System and the Ethics arising from humans reason and reason is one of the sources of jurisprudence and jurisprudence is in control of the humans‘ entire life and his/her individual and social relationships, this ethical principle has a place in jurisprudence, in this article we will make effort to review the corresponding principles to the aforesaid principle in Shia’s jurisprudence.

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This article aims to analyze and compare the perspectives of Thomas F. Wall and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas on the concept of natural law, highlighting their differing philosophical traditions. Wall, in “Critical Thinking”, presents a secular understanding of natural law, arguing that it is a human construct originating solely from human reasoning, independent of any divine authority. In contrast, al-Attas, in “Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam”, asserts that natural law, or sunnatullah, is divinely ordained, reflecting God's will in governing the universe while involving human participation. This study employs a philosophical approach grounded in the Islamic worldview to examine and contrast their interpretations, utilizing content analysis to systematically interpret the key arguments in their respective works. The findings reveal a fundamental divergence between the two perspectives: Wall perceives natural law as an innate principle recognized by human reason as the highest moral and ethical authority, whereas al-Attas views it as a manifestation of divine order that governs creation. This contrast underscores the broader epistemological differences between the Western secular and Islamic metaphysical worldviews in understanding the foundation and authority of natural law.

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

AI has never come to grips with how human beings reason in daily life. Many automated theorem-proving technologies exist, but they cannot serve as a foundation for automated reasoning systems. In this paper, we trace their limitations back to two historical developments in AI: the motivation to establish automated theorem-provers for systems of mathematical logic, and the formulation of nonmonotonic systems of reasoning. We then describe why human reasoning cannot be simulated by current machine reasoning or deep learning methodologies. People can generate inferences on their own instead of just evaluating them. They use strategies and fallible shortcuts when they reason. The discovery of an inconsistency does not result in an explosion of inferences—instead, it often prompts reasoners to abandon a premise. And the connectives they use in natural language have different meanings than those in classical logic. Only recently have cognitive scientists begun to implement automated reasoning systems that reflect these human patterns of reasoning. A key constraint of these recent implementations is that they compute, not proofs or truth values, but possibilities.

THINKING cannot occur without electrons, a point philosophically, scientifically and irrefutably confirmed for all, by the Electroencephalogram (EEG). However for 100 years, electrons and their ilk have scrupulously obeyed the Uncertainty Principle. Probability rules. The way human beings reason is by concluding that if event B is seen to follow cause A, it will do so again tomorrow—electrons don’t even support this today. Hume’s critique of causality which Kant failed to refute, gains traction from Quantum Mechanics. Despite needing to insert the word “probably” into every human reasoning, healthcare demonstrates an element of unexpected stability. The label “intent” is expanded to cover this anomaly, endeavouring to highlight how living cells cope with the impact of this unknowability, this Uncertainty. Mental health follows suit, though here the uncertainty comes additionally from “blockage” of the frontal lobes consequent upon trauma/terror. The collapse of today’s psychiatry is pathognomonic, and medically solipsistic. The role of “intent”, and its close relative, consent, are offered as remedies, not only for mental disease, relabelled here “social defeat”, but also for the global disease of violence, culminating in the biggest health threat of them all, thermonuclear war.

Rationality plays a key role in both the study of human reasoning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Certain notions of rationality have been adopted in AI as guides for the development of intelligent machines and these notions have been given a normative function. The notions of rationality in AI are often taken to be closely related to conceptions of rationality in human contexts. In this paper, we argue that the normative role of rationality differs in the human and artificial contexts. While rationality in human-focused fields of study is normative, prescribing how humans ought to reason, the normative conception in AI is built on a notion of human rationality which is descriptive, not normative, in the human context, as AI aims at building agents which reason as humans do. In order to make this point, we review prominent notions of rationality used in psychology, cognitive science, and (the history of) philosophy, as well as in AI, and discuss some factors that contributed to rationality being assigned the differing normative statuses in the differing fields of study. We argue that while ‘rationality’ is a normative notion in both AI and in human reasoning, the normativity of the AI conception of ‘rationality’ is grounded in a descriptive account of human rationality.

The rationale for the present volume is simple: The great majority the everyday reasoning, including that expert groups engaged their professions, is informal. By contrast, most the studies human inference reported by psychologists the literature are formal reasoning. This discrepancy provides considerable cause for concern and not only because cognitive psychology should have some practical application. Excessive focus on formal reasoning tasks has also, our view, inhibited the development good theories human reasoning. What Is Informal Reasoning, and Why Do We Need to Study It? Psychological studies formal reasoning have fallen largely into two domains: deductive reasoning and statistical inference. These two endeavours have much common and some researchers work both areas. In both cases, participants are presented with what problem-solving researchers call well-defined problems. A well-defined problem can be solved by use the information provided and no other; fact, the correct solution to these problems often requires the reasoner to use only the information provided the premises, and to avoid adding background information and knowledge to the problem domain. Instead, a correct solution is achieved by applying a normatively appropriate rule inference. Normative systems are often applied to formal reasoning problems order to define solutions as right or wrong, such that these problems are then construed as tests correct and fallacious reasoning. Hence, these problems are designed to measure the extent to which participants bring to the laboratory an understanding and ability to apply - the relative normative principles. In the case deductive reasoning research, the relevant normative system is formal logic. Participants are given some premises and asked whether a conclusion follows. Under strict deductive reasoning instructions, they are told (a) to assume that the premises are true and (b) to draw or approve only conclusions that necessarily follow. As observed elsewhere (Evans, 2002), this widely used method was developed over 40 years ago when belief logic as a normative and descriptive system for human reasoning was veiy much higher than it is today. In spite the method, much evidence has emerged to support the conclusion that pragmatic factors play a large part human reasoning. We say in spite of because standard deductive instructions aim to suppress precisely those factors that dominate informal reasoning: the introduction prior belief and the expression uncertainty premises and conclusions. In research on statistical inference, a similar story is found. People are asked to make statistical inference on the basis well-defined problems, which relevant probabilities or frequency distributions are provided, and their answers are assessed for correctness against the norms provided by the probability calculus. Research this tradition has been mostly conducted by researchers the heuristics and biases tradition inspired by the work Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). This results an arguably negative research strategy that is similar to much work on deductive reasoning. That is, researchers show primarily what people cannot do (conform to the principles logic or probability theory) and only secondarily address what people actually do. Indeed, one the most common explanations for why intelligent, educated individuals often fail to reason normatively is that they use informal reasoning processes to solve formal reasoning tasks. For example, notwithstanding instructions to the contraiy, reasoners often supplement the information they are provided with background knowledge and beliefs, and make inferences that are consistent with, rather than necessitated by, the premises. If this is the case, it is reasonable to suggest that we study these processes directly, by giving our participants tasks that allow them to express these types behaviours freely, rather than indirectly, via the observation poor performance on a formal task. …