Bad Thoughts: revisited

To insist that the other particpant in an argument (for instance a politician advocating a certain policy) displays evidence and reason implicitly acknowledges (a) the power that that participant has (to take a certain action, perhaps to make a decision) and (b) by that token, that the other participant is not obliged to have recourse only to reason in taking action. From this one can deduce that one is also alluding to (one's own) power in making an appeal to consider certain matters (for instance evidence, or lack thereof) in the other participant's decision-making process.

The implication of this is that in that situation one's own power may be as important (and possibly more important) as one's ability to reason and submit evidence.

It is not too difficult to contextualise this further (I will stop here), but it is interesting that a minimal amount of reasoning reveals reason to be deployed with a certain pretense - even as it makes an appeal to reason.

Thus one might think of saying that Jamie Whyte's exercise (in the form of the book Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking) attempts to teach reasoning for situations in which he experienced a lack of power of (pure) reason . That would account for his ire (a lack of power in those situations). But in that case his book is not a compelling argument to change the status quo, merely a demonstration of reason, where, and how it can be applied. One could then imagine that he would like people to be more like himself and appeal only to reason and evidence in all sorts of matters (wherein reason may or may not have a first priority status).