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On Reasons and Being Reasonable
Good vs. Bad Reasons and How to Know the Difference
My young daughter has started doing activity books where you trace over the letters of the alphabet, do basic mazes, and connect the dots to make animals. Now, she knows what to do. She does one or two pages correctly following the lines. Then, she starts to get bored. She stops following the lines and connects the dots in what appears to be a random way.
The first thing that comes to mind is to ask her why.
“Why are you connecting the dots randomly?”
Her answer:
“Because it’s a zombie!”
As you might have guessed, the picture is not a zombie, but some normal animal you would see in a zoo like an elephant or a giraffe. Yet what my daughter does, making her own picture with the dots, got me thinking about reasons.
In philosophy, I teach that reasons are the why behind what we do. For example, the reason I go to the store is because I want food to eat. Thus, reasons give us insights into the thought process of another person allowing us to connect the dots, so to speak, of how they got from A to B. However, as my daughter’s attempt to turn an elephant into a zombie shows, reasons don’t always help us understand…
