Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth

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Interesting article in the New York Times:

It is the only reason some people here use it...

Reason is for solving problems.

ruveyn

Not really new the sophists did that millennia earlier, what's next we re-reinvent concrete?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Reasoning is a tool, what's done with it is up to the user.
So we landed at intention which can be hard to reveal most time.

at the center of every human action is a selfish act.

In the heyday of the Greeks reason was best applied in geometry and invention, although since then classical education had consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the foundational subjects, and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as the subjects after that. These were the trivium and quadrivium, analogous to elementary and secondary education respectively. Logic was considered foundational to the proper understanding of the subjects after it, just as grammar was considered foundational to logic.

Nowadays, most public school students fail at grammar and arithmetic, hate geometry, may or may not know music, they know less of astronomy than Aristarchus, and mostly hear rhetoric yet they do know how to format essays and regurgitate information from short term memory in order to make their grade. For all the wealth of knowledge that has developed so close to modern times, government school students might as well be living in the "dark ages" and they'd learn more than they are required to today.

I just hope this "Feelings" craze just goes away soon, so that some reason can take the main stage again.

I do think both are important, but in some strange way societies as a whole are doomed to think in extremes.

Reason is not a weapon unless you need to bore someone to death.

Reason is a very useful tool in the early stages of training

and preparing material for publication

and at points in the investigation where one is hung up [think of the dog casting around to relocate the trail.

logic and reason are amoral - and often, because of that, immoral.

so they must always be in the service of higher ethics and values.

Ah - yes - the original question:

It has been amply demonstrated here, and repeatedly affirmed here, besides such sites as certain passages in eg Murder Must Advertise - reason does NOT win arguments.

Be sort of silly to demonstrate that logically, no?

In traditional society arguments are won by skilled lawyers [in the local tradition] mixing truth with sexy sauce convincingly.

In our society logic might win an argument at the debate tournament. Forget debates among the candidates, forget the law courts, forget the peer reviewed journal.

Here? Give them a humorous or spicy video, forget the logic. Your opponents will melt away, nobody listening to them.