In this essay I will argue that humans can and should not assume that our reason is universal but instead should contend with the possibility that our reason could be species specific. The goal of this will not be to prove that reason is definitely not universal, but rather to demonstrate that based on our current condition we have grounds to assume that our reason is species specific. Justifications for knowledge are commonly separated into a posteriori, meaning inductive conclusions based on empirical observations, and a priori, meaning deductive conclusions derived from first principles. Logic is often understood here as the tool that allows us to correctly abstract from those first principles. Let us begin by acknowledging that our capacity for reason seems to be at least somewhat related to our capacity to perceive the physical world surrounding us. Thomas Nagel in his essay “What is it like to be a bat?” pointed out, that we don’t know and can’t know what it is like for a bat to perceive the world through bat sonar and thus can never truly comprehend what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.1 When we imagine perceiving the world through bat sonar, our only point of reference is our own ability to see, so we imagine it to be at least somewhat similar. That, however, is an assumption that we have no way of proving right. Nagel explains that this is not us being able to imagine what it’s like for a bat to be a bat, but only what it would be like for a human to be a bat. So, our ability to imagine the reality of bat life and therefore reason about it is always limited by our own ability to perceive the world and extrapolate from it using our imagination. Furthermore we also know that there are other animals that can’t perceive everything humans can2, for example the Golden Mole does not possess functioning eyes so it does not see, but rather perceives the world through its sense of smell and feeling of vibrations.3 The Golden Mole does not know how colors look like and therefore would, if it reasons4, not include any information from this information layer it does not have access to. It would however be wrong to assume that this means the Golden Mole does not have access to information we cannot perceive. After all we can measure that its sense of smell and vibration vastly 1 Vgl. Nagel, Thomas: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, in: The Philosophical Review 84 (1974), s. 438- 439. 2 As opposed to bats, that can perceive everything we can and even more through sonar. 3 Vgl. Bronner, Gary; Perrin, Mike: Golden Moles, in: The Encyclopedia of Mammals (2006), https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199206087.001.0001/acref- 9780199206087-e-58. Aufgerufen am 17.02.2026. 4 If all animals do or do not possess a capacity for reason is unknowable to us, for the same reason that we do not know how their perception of the world is like to them. 3 exceeds our own even if we can’t comprehend what it is like to be a Golden Mole.5 Instead of thinking of the various layers of Information contained in reality as hierarchical, we should acknowledge that information layers do not supersede each other, but coexist without one offering necessarily more than another. To assume sight provides more information than smell can safely be attributed to an inherent human bias towards oneself. Seeing how the Golden Mole does not perceive the world visually and how we cannot comprehend what exactly and how it perceives anything, it would be wrong for us to assume that there is not any amount of information layers contained within reality we could not perceive. This leads us to the conclusion that it would be almost impossible to imagine a human that could reason adequately about something that is fundamentally unimaginable to them. This of course should not be understood to mean that everything humans can reason about is immediately perceivable. Through mathematics for instance, we can reason about various mathematical figures that are imperceivable to us, for example infinity. But all these mathematical figures are still abstracted from our perception of the physical world and never leave the realm of imaginability.6 To put it shortly: while we can’t perceive infinity, the way we imagine it is still an extrapolation of our perception of the world.7 To illustrate this point even further, let us imagine a person floating through an infinite void, who has never known anything but said void. Now it stands to reason that the only thing the void person could know anything about would be themselves, because there would simply be nothing else for them to gain information on.8 The void person’s entire frame of existence would simply be themselves, therefore they could not with any certainty say anything about anything not related to their body. So, while our human capacity for reason is tied to our human perception of the world, that itself does not mean that what our human capacity for reason abstracts, could not still be universally true justifications. Perhaps the use of logic as a tool elevates our reasoning from being tied to our human point of view to universal? First, logic itself appears to be abstracted from experience if you consider that 5 To understand why we can’t know what it is like to be anything but ourselves see: Nagel, Thomas: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, in: The Philosophical Review 84 (1974), S.43 5-450. 6 Imaginability however is meant here as a collective process. Something unimaginable would be unimaginable to every human, not just to some. 7 This is seen for example in the fact that the only way for us to grasp four dimensionality is as a mathematical extension of three dimensionality. 8 The underlying assumption here being, that dreams do not provide genuine new information. 4 fundamental logical laws like modus ponens seem to hold true when you apply them to the physical world, and it seems implausible that logic was solely understood through some innate quality inside of humanity. It seems unlikely then, that something also experience dependent could elevate other things to a universal state. Secondly, it is more than possible to draw correct logical conclusions from a set of wrong premises, therefore making it impossible for logic alone to elevate anything into the universal. Now to illustrate that not only the empirical information we inductively reason from, but also the first principles that we deductively reason from, are tied to human perception, let us imagine an astute being that transcends our ability to perceive the physical world. This astute being would possess our exact capacity for reason and share most of our capacity for perceiving the physical world, except that they could perceive something that is fundamentally incomprehensible to us.9 Let us call this incomprehensible object, law or whatever it may be, the Alectryon constant. This Alectryon constant would without doubt disprove the notion of causality10, essentially changing a fundamental first principle11 our world seemingly operates under. Now the astute being could observe the same physical world as us, with the exception that they would perceive the Alectryon constant, which would lead them to reason based on a different first principle and therefore deductively reach different conclusions. Of course, this would change a lot of the astute being’s empirical observations, considering a lot of ours are based on causality. But much more interestingly it would not just change inductive observations, but also one of the underlying first principles with which we deductively reason. So, the astute being would operate with a fundamentally different understanding of causality from us, from that follows that they would deductively construct different justifications a priori. Perhaps they would even formalize a different system of logic as a tool of 9 This astute being could be anything. It could be an alien, an animal which we fundamentally underestimate, perhaps even the Nietzschean Übermensch. For the argument this does not matter. 10 While we will for the sake of argument assume that this means every other part of the astute being’s perception would be overridden by the Alectryon Constant to reflect the absence of causality, one could also work based on the assumption that the “astute being” would have a fundamental contradiction baked into its perceptions. The consequences of this would be highly interesting, but an exploration of this is outside of constraints of this paper and I suspect it would not affect my argument much. 11 The exact nature of causality is not philosophically clear and therefore one could argue that causality is not a first principle, but a purely conventional definition. This however is not important for the argument of this paper, as causality only serves to illustrate the point that we can imagine the astute being having a fundamentally different understanding of any first principle. Causality could be replaced by another first principle, for example the law of identity, without changing the argument much. On causality as conventional definition: Frank, Philipp: Modern science and its philosophy, Cambridge 1949, S. 53-61. 5 abstraction, considering such a vastly different understanding of causality could have some impact on how a being might conceptualize logic. We have now established that both deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning as we know it are in some form specific to humans. Inductive reasoning because we must conclude from other animals not having the same access to information layers as us, and from us not having access to information layers that other animals possess access to, that it would be foolish to assume that our perception is ultimate and there is nothing out there that is fundamentally incomprehensible to us. And deductive reasoning because we can reasonably imagine an astute being that transcends our perception of the first principles and therefore would deduce other conclusions from them. It could of course be possible that astute beings and humans look at the same universal first principles but are judging them differently, based on the layers of information they have access to and are forming different particular first principles based on their different interpretations of the universal first principles. This, however, would not make reason itself universal, but only the subjects that beings reason about. Essentially entrapping every being into reasoning about the objective universal true physical realm based on their very limited perception of that realm and therefore creating species subjective reason. A question one finds themselves asking is: “If the astute beings and humans would be looking at the universal first principles but interpreting them differently, why do they seemingly contradict?”. It is hard to imagine causality and the absence of causality coexisting. Of course, contradictions can and do appear all the time, even in one and the same species. Often these differences are solved by analyzing the subject their perception differs about and providing a way that both their perceptions are not contradictory after all. However, regarding first principles that seems unlikely, considering we have no framework to explain the fundamental realities of the universe even more. One seemingly cannot explain why matter exists, why there seems to be causal relations or why energy in a closed system does not diminish. We can observe these laws of the physical world, but we cannot explain at this point why they are. Perhaps when or if we ever meet astute beings, we could find a way to create a framework that allows us to reason about first principles, a sort of “meta reason”. We might be able to find a way to reason more objectively about the potential differences in perception and reason that this paper pointed out with the help of this meta reason. However unlikely this might seem, a first step would necessarily be an acceptance that there even exists a subject to reason about. So, if humanity ever wants to reach subject independent reason, a 6 start would be to acknowledge the reality that our reason could very well be incredibly species-specific. It feels important to mention here that for the duration of this paper I have assumed that astute beings and any other beings still would have essentially the same capacity for reason as humans, but different starting conditions to reason from, based on the layers of information these beings have access too. This itself is of course an assumption. It could very well be that there are beings whose capacity for reason itself is very different from humans. However, ironically enough this is fundamentally unimaginable to humans, the same way it is unimaginable to us what it is like for a bat to be a bat, and therefore something we cannot reason about adequately. So, in conclusion, as this paper pointed out, there is evidence pointing us towards the assumption that our reason could be species specific. The first piece of evidence is that, based on other beings not having access to the information layers we have access to or even access to information layers we can’t fully comprehend, that we must assume that there are information layers contained within reality that we don’t have access to. And the second piece of evidence is that this could very well mean that even our understanding of the first principles is heavily impacted by the limited amount of information layers we have access to. Of course, this does not definitely prove that our reason is in fact species specific, but that if reason is universal, it would be seemingly impossible for us to know at this point. And that based on what we do know, the assumption that reason is species specific seems more reasonable. 7 Literaturverzeichnis Bronner, Gary; Perrin, Mike: Golden Moles, in: The Encyclopedia of Mammals (2006),https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199206087.001 .0001/acref-9780199206087-e-58. Aufgerufen am 17.02.2026. Frank, Philipp: Modern science and its philosophy, Cambridge 1949. Nagel, Thomas: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, in: The Philosophical Review 84 (1974), s. 435-450.
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