Limitations of reasoning

[birdman]

I am writing something in TOK and need help on limitations of reasoning. just examples.

[Eydie]

Maybe:

Emotion can affect the way we perceive objects represented by artistic creations better than Reason can.

Example - Painting 'Guernica' by Picasso conveys his anti-war sentiments - this is mainly perceived by the viewers because the painting affects our emotion (inspire sadness, disgust of war etc); this can be far more powerful in e.g. turning someone into a pacifist than a book can by talking reason into him/her. Thus Reason as a WOK is limited in this instance.

[Drake Glau]

I feel like that would be a limitation of perception. The way a person perceives something being affected by their emotional state. However there is still a few ways for emotion to get in the way of reasoning and the cheesiest one is how emotions can make unrealistic ideas seem to make perfect sense and could be true (here's the cheesiness, love causing people to reason through things in the most ridiculous ways).

Language could also limit reasoning simply because of translations. If you're reasoning through an article in a different language you might reason out what a specific word means but could possibly be something else giving the article a different connotation.

[Sandwich]

If you assume that the goal of reason is to bring us closer to the 'truth', whatever that may be, you can say that reason is fundamentally flawed because it's a way of processing things we already know together in order to form a conclusion. Just the fact that we've applied reason to a subject doesn't make it the truth at all because of a basic error: our original facts. You can use reason to say A. B. Therefore A then B. ...but if A and B aren't themselves true, reason is fundamentally limited by the fact it has to rely on their validity. A could be 'grass is green' and B could be 'all green things are aliens'.... therefore all grass is an alien?! Basic error!

...that's actually the biggest limitation of reasoning in a very analytical sense! If you don't mention that one, you're kinda skipping out on quite a bit point

Another one to consider is that reason is limited by practicality. For instance, the many-times-mentioned example that a couple of hundred years ago we assumed that "All swans are white" was a perfectly reasonable statement. Then the British colonised Australia and it turned out swans also comes in black. That particular piece of observational reasoning was blown out of the water So reason is limited by the fact we have to go through every single example of something to determine that there are DEFINITELY no exceptions. Can we do that? No, so generally we have to make do with specifically seeking exceptions until we're satisfied enough -- and even then, we're often proved wrong later.

Currently the limitation of reason most prominent in society is the mega-question "Is there a god?". Reasoning tells us that we can establish there is no god if we can PROVE it. How do we prove, however, that something for which there should arguably be NO solid evidence exists? And does an absence of evidence really mean we've disproved it -- or simply mean nothing, because god isn't a worldly thing so would leave no hard evidence? So reason is pretty screwed by anything which doesn't have an acceptable form of evidence. Actually, it's useless. Assuming of course that you're happy to say god doesn't leave solid evidence -- if you don't ascribe to this, reason more or less points to the fact that god appears, substantially at least, to be somewhat absent.

Which leads on nicely to the final thing which I believe somebody above me mentioned -- reason generally isn't the winner of the human condition. Perception, emotion etc. are always mingled with reason, and reason simply doesn't function properly if it's skewed in some way by another Way of Knowing because it requires that its original precepts A and B are correct. Any other way of knowing interpreting and changing A and B means that reason isn't doing so well!