The Reason Project

Reason and Reasoning: Critical Thinking for Adults

Most of us take for granted the world around us.  We make daily decisions that shape our attitudes and guide our behaviour, mostly routine but sometimes requiring conscious effort.  Occasionally there are tricky situations where there seems to be no clear choice about which way to jump.  In those instances, most of us tend to fall back on the familiar and the known to make our way forward.

The Reason Project is about thinking about this sort of everyday thinking … and providing people with tools for doing it better.

Reason vs Emotions

The world around us is full of emotion.  Advertisers tug on fear, greed or empathy to get their message across.  Films are full of sound and fury.  Politics relies on spin doctors to appeal to our tribal instincts.

Plato saw the battle between Reason and Emotion as two horses pulling a chariot in different directions while the charioteer desperately tries to make them work as a team.

The battle for supremacy between Reason and Emotion has raged ever since.  Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes thought everything could be derived from Reason alone.  David Hume on the other hand came to the conclusion that “Reason is a slave to the Passions”.  These days it seems Hume was right.

In a world that glorifies emotions and emotionality, the Reason Project seeks to balance up the scales.

Reason and Reasoning

Making conscious sense of the world, through perception, interpretation and evaluation, is a skill we have to learn.  It’s not innate and it can go wrong very easily.

Through modern science, we now know a lot about how the brain works, from the primitive ‘emotional brain’ to the extraordinary pre-frontal cortex that distinguishes humans from other sentient beings.

The Reason Project will bring together in one place an expanding set of tools to educate about Reason and to improve the skills of Reasoning – a sort of one-stop shop of Critical Thinking for Adults.

Why is this important?

We now know that all of us fall into logical fallacy traps – confirmation bias, selective perception, wrongful appeal to authority, and so on.  It’s natural because it’s how our brain works.  But it’s not something we should ignore.  Ignoring such logical fallacies can lead to poor decisions in personal choices.  Is now a good time to invest in the stock market? How should I vote in the next election? What else do I need to know before I buy a house?

An informed public is the foundation of a working democracy.  But information is not enough.  We all need to be able to critically evaluate the credibility of evidence and soundness of argument if democracy is to work as it should.

So just what will there be?

The Reason Project will have a number of elements.

There will be a website with some simple background information about the history of Reason and Reasoning and what we now know about the way we humans use our brains to reason.

In parallel, we’ll establish a “Reason Institute” – a sort of think-tank of Fellows who either work in the field of reasoning or who are recognised as clear thinking subject matter experts.

Who’s behind the Reason Institute?

The Reason Project is an initiative of the Rationalist Society, Australia’s oldest freethought group.  The RSA aims to promote Rationalism – that is, adherence to the principle that all significant beliefs and actions should be based on reason and evidence, that the natural world is the only world there is and that answers to the key questions of human existence are to be found only in that natural world.