Is it possible to use logic, rigor, and debate to understand people, or to make them understand you?
What are the limits of the rational approach to people?
In middle school and high school I was average at math, but I was very good at the sections devoted to logic: long chains of if/then statements were easy for me. And this then became my career. I've now spent 23 years writing software, and software is mostly long chains of if/then statements. So I love logic and I work with it every day. However, as a form of communication, used with other human beings, I've found that a naive application of logic is often harmful. Humans are not computers. Other considerations need to predominate.
In middle school and high school, as pre-teens and then teens, I think most of us get exposed to the occasional teacher who pleads with us to use logic, rigor, and debate to both understand things and also to teach others how to understand what we have learned. Maybe they call it the Socratic method or maybe they simply beg us to use less emotion and more reason. And that seems good at first. It seems clever, sophisticated, a hint of what adulthood might be like.
So we tried it. I had two friends in particular, Rob and Stratton, who were equally committed to logic, rigor, and debate. And as far as I know, Rob remains loyal to these ideas, as loyal as we all were when we 18. But it isn't going well for him.
The limits of logic, rigor, and debate
Of course, even as teenagers we were aware there were certain limits. When I was 18 myself and my friends read the novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" the philosophical masterpiece penned by Robert M. Pirsig. He makes a big deal about the discovery of hyperbolic geometry. For more than 2,000 years, people thought that Euclid's geometry described reality in some absolute sense. But then, in the 1820s, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and János Bolyai independently discovered hyperbolic geometry. Euclid imagines geometry on a flat surface, whereas hyperbolic imagines geometry on a sphere, so different rules apply. Under Euclid's axioms, two parallel lines can never touch each other, but under hyperbolic geometry, parallel lines can cross each other. Both assertions can be logically proven from axioms, if you start with different axioms.
So by the time we reached college, we were already aware that logic, rigor, and debate only worked with certain preconditions, and one of those preconditions meant that we had to work out with one another whether we were starting with the same basic set of ideas and principles, when we wanted to discuss an important issue. That is, were we starting with the same axioms? Even when discussing political or emotional topics, we thought we could use logic, rigor, and debate to build a perfect understanding of each other's ideas, if only we could first detail our initial assumptions.
You can imagine how tedious some of these conversations were.
But why should you accept my axioms, or why should I accept yours?
In college we learned of more limits to this method. In particular, we were exposed to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: for any given set of axioms, there will be statements that are true but not provable under those axioms. Godel's examples are esoteric and involve self-contradicting paradoxes (does the set of all sets contain the set of all sets) but we took this to be a philosophical statement with broad applications.
But it got worse.
Given any serious disagreement, we had to wrestle with the underlying issue: if we disagree because you use your axioms and I use my axioms then why should I respect your axioms, or why should you respect mine? Our initial assumptions seemed to be based on values that could not be analyzed from the point of view of pure logic. Axioms had to come first, logic could only be used to then prove whether a statement was consistent with those axioms.
Knowledge does not accumulate, instead, it evolves
In high school, most of our teachers had been (perhaps indirectly, without even being aware of it) under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper who had suggested that science is a process by which humanity acquires a better and better understanding of reality, in a cumulative process by which we store up more and more knowledge. But then in college, most of us had to read (or at least skim) Thomas Kuhn and his book "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions" where he pushed the idea of Incommensurability:
In the influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn made the dramatic claim that history of science reveals proponents of competing paradigms failing to make complete contact with each other’s views, so that they are always talking at least slightly at cross-purposes. Kuhn characterized ... the Newtonian paradigm as incommensurable with its Cartesian and Aristotelian predecessors in the history of physics, just as Lavoisier’s paradigm is incommensurable with that of Priestley’s in chemistry.
...Kuhn's investigations into the history of science revealed a phenomena often now called ‘Kuhn loss’: Problems whose solution was vitally important to the older tradition may temporarily disappear, become obsolete or even unscientific... So for example, Newton’s theory of gravity was initially widely rejected because it did not explain the attractive forces between matter, something required of any mechanics from the perspective of the proponents of Aristotle and Descartes’ theories (Kuhn 1962, 148). According to Kuhn, with the acceptance of Newton’s theory, this question was banished from science as illegitimate, only to re-emerge [centuries later] with the solution offered by general relativity. He concluded that scientific revolutions alter the very definition of science itself.
Maybe this only re-states the idea that two people, with different starting axioms, can use pure logic to reach completely different conclusions, but Kuhn was given so much respect in college, his arguments seemed to add more weight to the idea that logic, rigor, and debate could not be used to resolve disagreements. Two people operating with different paradigms will give a different weight to various facts. And each will consider certain questions important, which the other does not consider important at all.
It was around this time that I lost my faith in logic, rigor, and debate as methods for reaching an understanding with another person. All of the important disputes in life tend to be based around disagreements involving starting axioms, and logic and debate do nothing to prove that one set of axioms are better than another.
Rob and Phoenicia get married and raise a child
And as we all got into our 30s, what I witnessed in my own life, and in the lives of my friends, confirmed for me that logic, rigor, and debate are a weak set of tools for explaining myself to others, or for understanding them.
Rob got married to a woman named Phoenicia. And they argued. They argued often, and loudly, and intensely. They were trying to raise a child together, but they had no method for making decisions together.
Phoenicia felt that logic, rigor, and debate were needlessly aggressive and confrontational. Why should communication among intimates require a rigorous process of discovering one another's axioms? Couldn’t an understanding of their current situation arise flexibly and creatively from their actual experience of raising a child? And wasn't an easy affinity for each other's style of communication an essential starting point if two people were going to join their lives together? If rigor had any use, surely it was with strangers? What she needed, above all, was for him to listen to her, allowing her to speak in her own personal style, and accepting that style as legitimate and important.
In short, they had different paradigms of communication, paradigms that made different initial assumptions about the goal of communication. And the issues at stake were no longer the minor issues that we'd discussed when we were teenagers. Now the issues were serious: should their child go to private school or public school, how should they discipline the child when the child misbehaved, how much they should prioritize their careers versus their family time. For most people, these are high-stakes questions.
Eventually, they went to see a marriage counselor. Among the many lessons the marriage counselor tried to impart: don't talk over each other. A respectful relationship is one where people allow each other to finish whatever they are saying.
So then Rob and Phoenicia carefully avoided talking over each other. Sort of. What Rob would do was he would stand there with a notepad and a pen, and as Phoenicia was speaking Rob would jot down each thing she said that he felt was crazy, hysterical, irrational or emotional. And then, when she stopped talking, he would go over each point, reading from his notebook, explaining to her why she was wrong. He continued to cling to the idea that someday she would accept logic, rigor, and debate as a primary means of communication. She continued to hope that someday he would listen to what she was saying.
You can imagine how ugly some of their fights were. And eventually her patience ran out.
They ended up getting divorced.
Some people are deeply unwell
When I was a teenager I was somewhat naive. I thought everyone was arguing in good faith. it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I fully understood how many people lie. And some of them are great actors, some of them seem 100% sincere, so it is a shock when later on you realize they were lying. But dishonesty is surprisingly common. Logic, rigor, and debate won’t get you very far when you are the only one who plays by the rules. And in life, at work and among acquaintances, one often has to deal with those who cheat.
More so, a surprising number of people are mentally unwell. They are high functioning: they hold down a job, they have relationships, they might be married, have kids, they might achieve a high level of success. And yet, in some sense, they are barely holding on. A single tragedy causes them to spiral into alcohol or drugs or depression or paranoia. This was especially obvious once the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Some people fell apart. And some never recovered. They got lost in conspiracy theories and they are still lost now. Who knows if they will ever be normal again? What is for certain is that you cannot hope to understand them using logic, rigor, and debate.
Religious obsession, sexual obsession, the desperate need to control another human being, ego, fear, delusions of grandeur, a desire for fame or power, greed, the thrill of lying and getting away with it: there are a remarkable number of vices that cause people to engage with you in a motivated and dishonest manner. As we get older we become more and more aware of how common this is, how many different forms of dishonesty there are.
So in fact, for the vast majority of human interactions, logic, rigor, and debate are useless. At work, dealing with computers, I find logic useful, but when dealing with humans, it is the rare case where such an approach is useful.
What does work?
In the end, real maturity means realizing that there is a great diversity to styles of communication, and you increase your own effectiveness by learning as many styles as possible. I've done my best to write (on my other weblog, Respectful Leadership) about the different styles of communication that I've had to deal with at work. For instance:
Some people are passive-aggressive.
Some people are full of contempt for underlings.
Some people are are abusive, pathological liars.
Some people understand deadlines in different ways.
Some people are over-confident.
To be effective, you need to figure out what kind of person you are dealing with, what kind of personality traits they have, and you need to adjust your communication style to each of them. Trying to insist they use a particular style, just because it appealed to you when you were a teenager, is a bad strategy, since most people won't be able to adjust to your style. If you want to cripple your own ability to work with others, and live with others, and love others, you can, but that choice can only lead to unhappiness.
In the end, there is no one style of communication that works with everyone. Being able to communicate well with diverse people means learning a diverse set of communication styles.