Practical Reasoning

Reasoning out what seems to be the best way to arrange items in a small space, how to fit one object into another, or how to most inexpensively pass time on a trip are all examples of practical reasoning.  That is, someone must use reason in each case, as there is no knowledge apart from the grasp and use of reason, but the goal is not obtaining infallible certainty about ultimate truths or even seeking out abstract facts about reality on to even a much lesser extent.  The goal is to simply solve a problem that reduces down to a matter of convenience rather than thoroughly philosophical knowledge.  This makes practical reasoning a useful skill in life but a red herring to matters of deeper importance most of the time.  For this reason, even more basic truths about the laws of logic and the facts they reveal have an intrinsically higher significance.

Still, practicality does not have to be avoided and shunned in order to embrace or celebrate more abstract logical truths.  The more practical applications of reason do not need to be ignored in order to understand its grander qualities and revelations.  Instead of refusing to understand the usefulness of practicality, albeit a usefulness with a very limited scope, a consistently rational person will recognize the true place of practical matters: they are never as foundational or important as the purely abstract side of reason, consciousness, and even the external world that houses the practical problems which sometimes need a resolution.  There is a sense in which intentionally recognizing the inherent veracity of logical axioms is clearly the most basic step someone could take towards knowing truths, but even this knowledge, which is required to even understand practicality as a rationalist, is deeper than the whole of practical affairs.

The highest use of reason and therefore intelligence, though, is looking to the laws of logic to reveal abstract necessary truths about all of reality rather than resolving practical problems, even if they have a global scale and affect the lives of billions of people.  After all, philosophy encompasses everything, and a mostly practical kind of problem inherently has less philosophical significance than even the most foundational (as in basic) truth about logic and broad metaphysics.  Practicality is about nothing more than sheer convenience left to itself.  Yes, practicality falls under the domain of logic because it is impossible for anything at all not to, but the laws of logic have far more important ramifications than the fact that they can be consulted for everyday problems of an explicitly practical nature.

Practical reasoning can be both very helpful and philosophically trivial on its own.  Indeed, it is both of these things at once.  To dismiss it entirely and to exalt it above issues of more foundational or precise truth is to misunderstand even the most pragmatic side of reason that non-rationalists themselves are often likely to grasp to some small extent.  A person has to be a slave to ignorance or assumptions to truly confuse the practical for the abstract or the convenient for the important.  Yes, every abstract logical/philosophical truth has practical ramifications for at least how a person might feel, and every practical truth could not be true without relying on the abstract logical axioms that govern all things.  The relationship being intertwined does not mean practicality ever outweighs core metaphysical and epistemological facts.