01 Dec 2007, 2:36 pm
Ragtime wrote:
Angelus-Mortis wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Angelus-Mortis wrote:
As for the question of "having faith" in logic or reasoning, I choose not to call it such because choosing logic or reasoning is not done out of little or no evidence--afterall, logic and reason have proven themselves to work more often than not, and it is for this reason that I choose to follow logic and reasoning. Same goes with probability. Probability works more often than not, and by that vein of logic, it is worth relying on. Although you could say that probability is a subset of logic, so I follow it for the same reasoning I follow logic.
The reasoning is false though. The thing is that logic and reason cannot be judged outside of logic and reason, therefore, your argument is that your system proves itself. I mean, can you alogically judge logic and judge reason irrespective of reason. By that same vein of experience, don't most theists argue that they follow their faith because of what it has done? Their personal revelation? I mean, I know Ragtime has said he has experienced a connection with God. Because of that, can't we ultimately argue against knowledge if we logically examine the illogic of reality? It all ends up falling down to evidence and evidence is different from objective proof. I mean, epistemologically can we ever know despite how much we *must* act like we know.
There is evidence that logic and reasoning work though. I only argue that I do not choose logic or reasoning because of faith, and if the evidence lead me to choosing logic or religion, then it could not have been faith.
The faith enters in when you expect logic to never let you down, despite not possessing true knowledge that it won't. As toward religion, evidence leads people toward logic, but only faith lets them trust in it for future results.
I do not expect logic to work, only observe that it does, which is evidence in itself. To expect anything of logic or any other method is a sign of faith. Instead of doing that for every single case, you can simply prove that this works for a general case--evidence that this works for every single case under the given conditions. This is not faith, but observing that logic actually works. Thus I do not have faith that this works, but an understanding of why it works, and accept it because it does work.
Quote:
One does not stand outside of logic, observe it working a thousand times in a row, and still remain apathetic to that fact. We don't simply think, "Hmmm, so far, logic has always worked. Oh well..." No, we join up with it, we embrace it, or at the very least we're attracted to it, because it's working. But only faith can say that logic will continue to work.
If you suggest that we need faith to see that logic works, then we cannot see the beauty of logic because that would be no different from saying that logic works without investigating how or why it works. That would simply be like saying the theory of evolution works because some scientists said so, without investigating for yourself what evolution really is, how it works, and what the scientists have found themselves.
Quote:
You can call it absolute knowledge if you wish, but that is a bluff. All you have is finite evidence that logic will continue to work -- else, your mind is not finite. (I trust we all agree that our minds are finite -- unless we have some gods here among us. 
)
)Logic need not be proven through "finite evidences", much the same way science does not need to prove. You could easily suggest what logic is and isn't from what you can disprove. It is much simpler to disprove something than to prove something because you only need one contradiction to disprove it. In this case, we don't need an infinite amount of evidences, but that one case failing is good enough to disprove something. Or, as I have mentioned before, it works for the general cases, and we need not consider every single case; we need only have evidence for the general case. Again, we need not expect that this is always true; perhaps logic might not work (although this could be the case of applying poor logic that doesn't represent real logic in any way), but because I have not encountered such a case where logic does not work, the probability that it doesn't work has already been quite minimized.
21 Dec 2007, 1:18 pm
24 Dec 2007, 3:43 am
24 Dec 2007, 2:49 pm
24 Dec 2007, 6:57 pm
