Mini TOK essay

Question: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of reason as a Way of Knowing?

Reason is and has always been a basic part in every human being’s life. We are born without reason therefore people say that kids are very “pure”, and little by little we are taught reason to be able to know and learn things which lead us to “truth”. So reason gives us truth but certainly not always. Reason derives from sense perception but mostly it is society who teaches us what is or is not reasonable, what is “common sense” or “straight forward”, and through these terms we make true terms through reason, like math and money.

So reason is basically taught to us ever since we are born, but where does reason come from? What is reasonable or not comes from basic sense perception but only some of what is reasonable or not actually derives from what we feel, see, touch, hear or taste. Just as well as we know that a lemon is not sweet, if we are told that a person is like a lemon we deduce that he or she is not sweet. So how do these connections become “obvious” in our mind? The answer is Society. Society teaches us almost how to think; also called “assumption”. All in all society creates a “basis of thought” in which everyone understands and reasons in almost the same way. Some people may believe different things but it all has a “reasonable” side to it. For example racism is something considered ethically and humanely wrong for many, but for the people who are racists it makes “sense” and not just that, it has a “basis of thought” (one race is superior to the other because of physical or other reasons that are reasonable). In the end different people reason in different ways but they all reason under “common sense” for them.

How is reason “obvious” or straight forward, what is common sense? The term common sense best describes all the previous ideas. It is a general or common way to think and therefore mentally “sensing” something. This term is a very important idea for the two biggest examples of reason as a society created way to think. In education: math and in our daily lives: money. Math is a vital part of education and consequently of life too, in everything there are amounts and quantities of things and people gave symbols and names to these amounts, these in turn made an enormously significant part of our society up until today: money. Reason takes us to many terms which are “true” or obvious but many of these terms are not at all naturally reasonable: take money as an example, money is nothing at all, a piece of paper that makes some happy and some unhappy, it gives people anything they want physically and even hurts them emotionally. All in all money is a mental illusion with an enormous global power and essentially none of it is true, paper could never have such a great value.

In the end reason is something that we cannot live without since it is the basis of all that surrounds us. However if we look at reason from an outside perspective, examples such as racism, money and math show us how reason does not always give us truth in a natural point of view.