Reason and understanding

By Dr Mohd Zaidi Ismail,
Senior Fellow/Director,
Centre for Science and Technoloty, IKIM

Thinking is the mental act of putting what one has already known into meaningful order to arrive at what one is still ignorant of.

We have explained before that in any true epistemic act as conceived of in the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam, one cannot start from either what is unclear or what one is ignorant of, hoping to grasp what is clear and understandable (see, among others, Ikim Views of Jan 29, July 22 and Sept 23, 2008).

As such, knowing as a mental act has often been formulated as the progress of one’s mind from what has already been known to what is still unknown.

Such a formula is meant to be a general principle that guides any act or activity deserving of being regarded as knowledge oriented, be it one’s act of reading, defining, clarifying, thinking, and so on.

We have also explained how thinking, being an integral cognitive component in knowledge and science, is guided and regulated by that epistemic principle.

To recapitulate, thinking has been described in ‘ilm al-mantiq – the discipline of logic in the Islamic religious, intellectual and scientific tradition – as the mental act of putting what one has already known into meaningful order in order to arrive at what one is still ignorant of.

In spite of the fact that thinking is an essential cognitive component in knowledge and science, it cannot be realised without ideas, notions and concepts.

Ideas or concepts are therefore the rudiments of thinking.

As such, more basic but yet so integral to thinking is one’s grasp of ideas, notions and concepts.

Nevertheless, as the human mind primarily thinks by means of words or linguistic symbols, ideas or concepts being the essential constituents of thinking are primarily expressed by and couched in words or terms as well.

Hence, at that basic epistemic level, one cannot do without the proper act of clarifying a term or word and thereby truly knowing an idea or a concept, an act that is referred to as definition.

Yet, in attempts at a correct or valid definition, one again finds the same epistemic formula applying thereto as a guiding principle.

To define something correctly, one has to meet certain conditions or requirements.

Some such conditions turn out to be the ramifications of the above principle.

One of them requires that the definiens (that is, words or terms which are used to define a particular word or term) must be more clear than the definiendum (the word or term being defined).

We may want to refer to this condition as The Rule of Clarity.

To illustrate this, suppose that one is asked to explain what “reason” actually is to an audience comprising primarily novices and the general public.

In explaining, one says: “It is an important noetic power concerned with analysis and discursive thinking.”

The above explanation however, unless further clarified, contains such words as “noetic” and “discursive” which, to the layman, are no more enlightening than what was originally being defined, namely, reason.

In fact, we may well assume that reason itself is better understood by such an audience than all those words purportedly intended to define it.

Such an explanation, in other words, simply does not make “reason” any more lucid.

Another condition, which we may want to regard as The Rule of Non-Circularity, demands that the definiendum not be present in the definition itself.

In other words, the definiendum must not in any way turn out to be any of the definiens.

For instance, suppose that one is asked about what knowledge essentially is and in answering, one says: “It is that which renders a person who has the potentiality to know an actual knower.”

Such an answer, unfortunately, does not really explain what knowledge is because, clearly, the term one seeks to make plain appears itself, in a slightly different form, in one’s very explanation – namely, in the words “know” and “knower.”

Therefore, in using the same terms to define a word, the explanation is circular and thus purely redundant.

Upon scrutiny, however, one may well conclude that this latter rule is a detailed elucidation of the former.

By virtue of the fact that the definien is required to be more clear than the definiendum, it cannot therefore be just as ambiguous, let alone more ambiguous than that it seeks to clarify.

As such, the definiendum being present in the definition, which is nothing more than a set of definiens, renders the definition no better than the thing one is ignorant of initially.

In short, one’s not meeting any, or both, of the aforementioned conditions pertaining to the valid definition of words and terms, is tantamount to one’s violating the above epistemic principle, thereby depriving one of true knowledge.

Therefore, attempts at clarity in thoughts and ideas, which are even more pressing amid competing slogans and enticing rhetoric, which at present seems to have fully occupied our intellectual space, require that the foregoing epistemic principle not only be afforded its paramount role again, but also to be abided.