“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”

–Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass

When we call reason an “orthodoxy,” we use the word with particular deliberation. An “orthodoxy” is:

1. Soundness of faith; a belief in the doctrines taught in the Scriptures, or in some established standard of faith; 2. Consonance to genuine Scriptural doctrines; — said of moral doctrines and beliefs; as, the orthodoxy of a creed.3. By extension, said of any correct doctrine or belief.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.

This site operates on a leap of faith–faith that reason is not only an established standard or a generally accepted belief, but that it is a useful and correct method of perceiving and interacting with actual reality. A large body of philosophical work has addressed the relationship between reason and reality; we seek neither to duplicate nor add to it. We seek only to explain our adherence to this orthodoxy, despite its recognized limits.

In one sense, all thinking people are forced to take this leap of faith, whether they acknowledge it or not. Principles of reason are essential to thought and language. Without reason, we would be unable to make sense of our perceptions and experiences, and symbols such as letters and words would have no meaning. In other words, without reason, we would be incapable of knowing, and, even if we knew anything, incapable of symbolizing that knowledge in a language that other people could understand. Reason serves at least the function of permitting thought and its communication, and some (such as Hegel) suggest that it validly does much more. No matter what reason’s proper scope may be, reason itself is an irreducible part of the determination, for without reason, reason’s validity cannot be debated.

Reason itself does not promise that it will guide us to conclusions that are objectively true; only to conclusions that are consistent. Reason is, in this sense, unexaminable. We must use reason to examine reason, so it stands to reason that reason to a degree defies analysis. If reason does not relate to objective reality, our inability to examine it through any lens other than itself is likely to keep us from detecting the disconnect or from knowing how actual reality differs from reason’s interpretations of our perceptions.

And, even if we could examine reason from an unreasoning reference frame, the concept of reason is not designed to guarantee correctness with respect to actual reality. Reason gives us a standard by which we can judge whether statements are consistent internally and with other facts we believe to be true, and thus we can judge whether those statements are true or false, probable or improbable, wise or foolish. Applying reason guarantees only that we order our perceptions consistently; it does not guarantee that those perceptions are accurate or that our conclusions are correct. The objective relationship between reason and truth is thus uncertain.

We have no answer for this uncertainty, other than to say that if the doubt it raises about reason is well-founded, the uncertainty itself was arrived at through reason, and so is untrustworthy in its own terms. In other words, if our perceptions, ordered through the right use of reason, cannot be trusted to reflect actual reality to some meaningful degree, then discussion has little value as a means to discovering truth.

In other words, we proceed on the assumptions that objective truths exist and that reason is a universal tool that can be used to reach accurate conclusions about them.  We reject the prevailing popular presumption that truth is subjective (that is, does not exist) and that reason is merely an arbitrary construct by which individuals determine and express their preferences.   

If our assumptions are correct, then the project of this website is a search for truth that is moral in the purest sense of the word. If reason provides a standard by which actual falsity or actual probity can be measured, even if only probabilistically, few endeavors could be more valuable than using it to eliminate falsehood and multiply truth. It is our hope this site serves that function.