Orwell wrote:
If you don't take anything as a starting basis, there is no way of doing anything. Can we prove why logic *must* be true? No, but we take it to be true. No one has ever raised a serious objection to the law of non-contradiction or any of the other logical axioms. They not only can be taken as obvious, but *must* be taken as obvious in order to begin any sort of study of truth or knowledge, because without some form of reasoning you're left without saying anything that you can defend at all. No more epistemic nihilism please, it's too annoying.
Orwell, Hegal took objection to the law of non-contradiction. Hegel, one of the better-known philosophers of the 19th century. You can disagree with Hegel, but to say that no objections have ever occurred is ahistorical. There is a reason why I stated "we should have gone over to the Hegelian dialectic, as the law of non-contradiction is just lame."
In any case, I don't see a reason to say that your position *must* be taken as obvious. I think that instead, our logical rules should now be the following:
1) All meaningful propositions must agree with what I say. (Law of awesome gloriousness)
If your rules *must* be taken obviously, then why not mine?
29 Jan 2009, 8:53 pm
