Hoàng-Ân
Journal 13: Wednsday, 03/16/1992
Reasoning is crucial in living and loving responsively and meaningfully. The difference between thinking and reasoning is that we can think randomly but to reason we must use logic to get to a rational conclusion.
During the course of living out a day in our lives, thoughts fill our heads ( in living out a day I mean the performing, acting, playing out roles and paying respect to others with some degree of selflessness): To have thoughts, however, is not necessarily the same as thinking. Our thoughts can jump staccatoically from one irrelevant topic to another, or simply wander about. Bordsley wrote in his book, "Thinking Straight": "Generally speaking, we don't think unless we have to make a choice--unless we have a problem. To put it another way, thinking is something we do to answer a 'question'...it is the presence of conflicting aims that makes the problem. And this is where thinking comes in." Thinking, nevertheless, is not always clear thinking. To think clearly requires training and a sincere effort in practicing the correct ways to think. When we apply logic to discipline our thought process, we are reasoning. Logic is a discipline. It provides us tools to discern between correct reasonings and fallacies or incorrect reasonings. As Charles Sanders Peirce has said, "...bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic."
We need the ability to reason correctly because our lives, ultimately, depend on it. As a part of society, each of us can create peace and advancemence in our world through the use of reason. "Civilized life depends upon the success of reason in social intercourse, the prevalence of logic over violence in interpersonal conflict." As consumers of a free market system, we need reason to protect ourselves against fraudulent advertises that make appeals to our subliminal instincts. As citizens of a democratic system, we must use our reasoning faculties to make judgments and decisions that are as rational as possible. In this modern Age-of-Information, words are abused, and ignorance through laziness, is manipulated by mass media to sell from material-commodities to ideas and political ambitions, etc. In other words, "We are asked, not only to believe, but to act upon the belief: to pull the second lever, to sign the petition, to buy or sell, hire or fire, eat or not eat."
To reason well, there are basically three steps: The first step is to know how language is used or misused; The second step is to acquire the skill to discern what a statement or statements mean(s). Finally, we must understand some techniques of logic and the principles of correct reasoning.
To master the art of reasoning, we must penetrate into the heart of a problem and think of all the possibilities of answering the quesion(s) at hand. We must ask the right questions about the discourse and then concentrate on the discourse itself. Do not let the manipulation of words confuse us through ambiguity or implied inferences. We must understand what is the statement a discourse wants to make, then use the rules of logic to eliminate appeals made to our human vainities and emotions.
Living in a democratic nation, some of its citizens take for granted the power to personally affecting the conducts of their government. As a former political refugee, now an American citizen, I know full well the blessing of self-determination. To maintain and protect the final authority belongs to the people of a democracy, we must reason correctly and actively influent our government officials: and maintain and encourage the critical factor of "Check-and-Balance" proclaims in the most fascinatingly beautiful Constitution of the United States of America: in which I love and appreciate best the statement "the right to pursue happiness."
And we can only be happy when we are free..!!
