From Intuitive Snap Judgments to Rules

• We begin with a capacity for intuitive reasoning or inferring, an ability to pull conclusions from experience without any particular structure, rules, or method. This works well enough for the purposes of survival and natural selection.
• Our initial interest is not in “How do things work?” but only in “How do things work for me?”
• This is the level at which indigenous knowledge, the knowledge of shared experience, also called culture, stops. It consists of three things, those habits constituting the way of life the culture adopts and passes down, the facts which the culture must bear in mind to survive in their habitat with their chosen way of life, and the beliefs which provide a supporting framework for the two former.
• Learned habits and facts are tools for life in the most direct way. Beliefs are tools for life in a more indirect way, justifying the way of life and its knowledge base and unifying their diverse elements, if only in creation myths or oral sagas preserving a history of this people as they would like to see themselves. This whole montage we can refer to as culture.
• I will define as a cult an adoptive set of beliefs, resting on an internal authority, recognition of which defines membership. Initially, cultures and cults are indistinguishable.
• At some point in their development, cultures develop arts and sciences, which begin the process of replacing the intuitive judgments upon which indigenous knowledge is built with rules and formalized judgments. One may distinguish cultures that reach this point by designating them as civilizations.
• Rules and formalized judgments improve upon intuitive judgments by providing a rationale. Rules are formulated with a precision that limits or abolishes the leeway for interpretations, variable inferences about the meaning of the rule or about how to apply it to the given case.
• Rules eliminate interpretation by either defining an operation or defining a quantity to be measured in quantitative terms. In logic, a syllogism defines how to deduce a conclusion from two premises by means of a middle term that appears in both premises. In mathematics, counting defines the designation and incrementation of a unit, the basis for all demonstrable arithmetic propositions. In optics, the correlating of color to the length of the light-waves producing it makes the quality of color measurable as a quantity.
• Formalized judgments cannot reduce their predecessor intuitive judgments to rules but they do provide rationales that can be examined and cross-examined in a dialogue of experts, that is, a dialogue that compares the experiences and rationales of those experienced in a particular form of judgments. For an account of how to examine such a dialogue, see Socratic Method Is the Vivisection of Dialogue.
• The defining feature of a cult is that its internal authority has no communicable basis apart from the authority of the cult and its culture themselves. In other words, there are no rules or formalized judgments that can be shared across the boundaries of the cult.
• Aquinas’s distinction between truths accessible to the natural light of reason and articles of faith distinguishes that within the Catholic faith that belongs to arts and sciences of civilization (and, thus, is shareable beyond the limits of the cult) from that which is not. The truths drawing on the natural light of reason were taken as common ground by this Catholic saint-to-be, shared with Aristotle, Al-farabi, and Moses Maimonides.
• We can now return to the habits, facts, and beliefs with which culture begins and see how they transform under the arts and sciences, and also where they resist such transformation. The habits of an art, science or area of knowledge are its methods. Its facts are the material or data it works upon, produces, and works upon further. Its beliefs are its assumptions, the starting-points one must assume in order to apply the method to the materials, such as the axiom of a formal mathematical system or the principle of causality of any empirical investigation.
• Remember that, initially, we only seek to know How things work for us. That only changes when one commits to mastering an art or science, for doing so requires one to shift one’s focus from how it works for me to how it works in accordance with the shared rules or formalized judgments that make a community of expert knowers possible.
• Lacking that commitment, most people will continue to pursue how things work for them. Thus, if evolutionary theory undercuts the beliefs about one’s own cultural identity that works for them, they will remain unconvinced regardless of the available evidence, for they have never truly abandoned cultural beliefs in favor of scientific rules. Likewise, if their means of earning a living, or their local economy, depends upon activities that contribute to global warming — raising livestock, deforestation, hydrocarbon extraction — they will remain unconvinced regardless of the available evidence. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
• Coming soon: “What Following Rules or Formalized Judgments Makes Possible: Being Properly Human.”