As a way of knowing, emotions, language and logic are the strengths and weaknesses. First, we will look at strengths and weaknesses of reason through logic. As reason helps your understanding the world which knowledge identify senses by gaining knowledge through the information that you currently have, meaning that you are combining knowledge into one belief. We often suppose that other person’s thinking is not perfect, sometime without considering whether the real problem is actually with our own thinking.
When we observe that our own thinking is, therefore “perfect solution” for us, so our belief that such solution involves in reasoning things that we believe and experience through logic. Inductive and Deductive reasoning can give us proof that our belief might not always be true, such that limited knowledge and false belief can cause reason to be false. Emotions could prevent or ignore reason from your currently knowledge and beliefs, where emotions show weaknesses in reasoning something in general. If we talk about knowledge, language plays important part in it and when reasoning something we obviously need language to demonstrate everything. Without language, we could not have knowledge and reason.
First if we will talk about logic, reasoning the world is obviously difficult or supposedly impossible without knowledge and reason, there are two opposite direction for reasoning which is Inductive reasoning that moves from a data and determine a conclusion which can be obtain from the data and the other one is Deductive reasoning which begins with statements which are likely to be true and determine what could possibly be true if statements are true.
In deductive reasoning a valid argument will be examined for a conclusion. For example, all animals that have wings can fly. This is an animal with wings. Therefore this animal can fly. The argument is valid but, this argument may not be true. The circular nature of the world would be the strength of deductive argument which holds the conclusion where it contains in the arguments and the “truth value” of deductive argument is the only weakness in the arguments.
Inductive reasoning, arguments will be gathered together from particular observations then it reasons from particular arguments to form a conclusion. For example, in order to form inductive reasoning we have to collect the evidence by observing 100 animals with wings, and then we look on the data we have to check, whether all animals with wings can fly. For example, if I observed that 100 animals with wings can fly then I conclude that 100 animals with wings must be able to fly. I just made up a prediction from my conclusion that 100 animals with wings must be able to fly because now I only see 100 animals. But more data could prove that the 101 of the animals with wings cannot fly. This denies my conclusion that all animals with wings can fly.
The logical certainty depends on my interpretation and my knowledge in reasoning on data and without knowing further data, whether it is exists or not. The weakness of deductive and inductive arguments in logic thinking is that the argument may never be proven that all animals with wings can fly because we won’t be able to observe all animals with wings fly at the same time and without knowing further data we will never know an exact result even though we give all of our knowledge in reasoning it.
Beliefs are an example argument of “individual” if we look carefully at individual’s beliefs we could observe that people justify beliefs by using reasons. For example, “Is God really exists?” this is the controversy argument. People always find the evidences or the arguments which suit their belief and in the same time truth is being discovered. For example, Bible is the evidence of God. The Bible might record every words correct, but if we have not experienced what was done in the Bible, we will not entirely belief such things as a reason to believe in God.
So, beliefs are the additional knowledge throughout the world and beliefs do not entirely give us an absolute reason. Beliefs could be both strength and weakness of reason. As we can see from the individuals that people often left out other persons’ beliefs to overcome their own beliefs, for example one person might say “Why do I have to believe in God? I have never seen him, so I don’t know whether he’s real or not.” and other person may have a controversy argument that “I do believe in God because the Bible shows me what he does.” this could be a weakness of reason.
The strength could be that reason attempt to discover what is true, for example Darwin said that “Evolution is the process of cumulative change in the heritable characteristics of a population” he shows that he had discovered the true about evolution though his study by using reason. Through perception, “Is everything we see is real?” The answer is No; we might see 4 – 5 legs or even more legs on an elephant in the picture. Our senses do not always give us a true which means perception is the weakness of reason because what we see might not always be true.