Indeed. So let’s argue. (Consider the previous post my “opener,” ostentatious as it may be.)
You’re simply recognizing the plurality of logics, not its distinction from other forms of “guesswork.” Can you give me an illogical function of information processing please?
Also, you are right in indicating the great Walter Sobchak as one of this centuries finest philosophers. Not in 'Nam, of course.
well, i’m not sure exactly what you’re after:
any time we think something is what it by definition cannot be would be an example of illogical information processing
however, i think more important here (and correct me if i’m wrong) is the question of a-logical (if you will) information processing - start with “the sky is blue” - not a logical conclusion - but a simple, fundamental observation - one which is not actually always correct, but one which we, for general purposes, take to be true, and certainly a meaningful assertion in any case - when we make it, say as young children first learning our colors, we are of course employing grammatical rules in how we arrange the words and we are invoking certain definitions, so we arrange it logically in order to convey it to others, but the information itself is not logically derived, the fact that the sky is blue (if it is) is not a logical or illogical fact, it is logically neutral - in fact, chances are the statement itself would have a hard time standing up to logical scrutiny, as the sky is not always and everywhere blue by definition - but, for the most part, we take the general observation that the sky is blue to be a fact of the world.
or, i suppose, we could go with the illogical assertion that 1+1=1; someone might arrive at that conclusion after pouring two cans of soda into a bucket and observing that they still only have one bucket of soda.
or, we could go with the mystical sensation many people have (the feeling) that there is a god in the universe - again, this is not logically derived information, but it is a form of “knowledge” about what is the case (we can, of course, arrive at this conclusion in a logical way as well, by saying that such and such is the case, therefore there are divine forces, etc - but i’m trying to get at the sense in which we have IMPRESSIONS about what is the case before we submit them to logical analysis or critique - it’s these impressions which are themselves not necessarily logical, yet which we are prone to take as true, and which often work for us as truths, whether they are logically verifiable or not)
i hope i’m not confusing what you take to be the issue, like i said, i’m not exactly sure what you are after, so i’m trying to cover all the bases . . .
In fact, ugly, very little information is purely logical. When is the last time anyone here made an argument and were somehow surprised by the conclusion they arrived at?
An OP with which I can agree!!! I do think we should consider Husserl’s idea of the “life-world” as the common ground for all else. He notes that logico-mathematical “objective truths” owe their verification to the subjective, preverbal, experiential ground. I interpret this to mean that the structure of our logic owes to our experience with structure. Reason appears to be an adaptational tool based on our experience as structures. It works to our advantage; but it is not the end-all, be-all of experiences that can be extrapolated into views of human reality.
Yeah, okay, I think I see what you are getting at. This echoes logical positivists. You seem to have read a lot of Carnap, or if you haven’t, you should.
Anywho, you are assuming something about logic: that it pivots upon the the axioms of verification. Not so. Nothing is truly verified so much as it falsified into its current condition. At least, this is Popper’s conception of science. I’m not sure if this applies to the discussion at hand but intuition says yes. I don’t feel this post would have been made under Popper’s tutelage.
Two questions: What distinctions, if any, do you make between analytical statements (statements whose truth is based on their syntax alone) and synthetic statements (statements whose truth is based on observed fact)? And, in your OP you said, “Logic is a specific way of arranging things to give them meaning, but to suggest that it is the BEST method of arrangement is to make a subjective aesthetic assertion”; what alternatives might you proffer? I ask the latter, because I might agree, but not sure what you have to say.
8 year olds dude.
i don’t know that i am making any such assumption - when i talk about logical verification, i’m just talking about provability, or logic’s role in enabling us to predict what will be the case - i recognize that these are not the only uses of logic, however.
this certainly sounds like an interesting assertion, but i would need you to clarify what you (or Popper) mean
Well, basically i’m taking “truth” to be representative of what is the case - and grammar, or logical syntax, once instilled, has a way of determining both what it is we are looking for and what we see when we make observations, so i’m not sure that there’s a hard and fast or necessary distinction to be made, only a potentially useful one - but regardless in making such distinction we wouldn’t be dealing with two wholly separate forms of truth - “Socrates is mortal” for instance, would be true both ways – our impression is that all men die and that Socrates is a man, thus we have a statement whos truth is based on observed “fact”- at the same time the definitions of the terms “mortal”, “man”, and “Socrates” demand that the statement be true, independent of our observations - one of the things the analytic/synthetic distinction does is create the impression that logic allows things to be true independent of what we observe, but at the same time the impression that things can be true independent of observations is also just an observation - so the distinction probably becomes murky if we pursue it too far, if you see what i mean . . . ultimately, all statements are about something - Even 2+2=4 starts as an observed fact about the world. To a great extent, reality mirrors our syntax and vice versa.
art - poetry - alogical approaches - there are emotional truths, there may be spiritual truths - we can engage in a deliberate bending of the rules - i suppose anything that either doesn’t follow rules or follows different rules from logic is an alternative - it doesn’t matter, the point is one is as likely to be as true as the other - all you need is some sort of meaning, be it arbitrary or otherwise. the limits of the possibly true are not the limits of the strictly logical - one can prefer strictly logical explanations - but in the end, that is just a matter of opinion - it’s about which one holds correct FOR me - which one works for a given individual - even pablum can be assigned a specific meaning after the fact - it all starts out as meaninglessness, it’s just a question of what we as individuals use to fill that void, a question of which truth we prefer - i said it’s an aesthetic choice, and i think it is, but it can also a pragmatic one - insofar as we can align our preferences, we can agree on what is true. Truth arises from consensus, which is notoriously unstable, and that is true whether we prefer a logical, ordered universe or an absurd one or anything in between. the world is not an entirely rational place, there is no logical reason to assume that what is logical has anything to do with what is true.
I think the issue needs to be clarified by muddling it. A process of thought can at once be either, both, or neither logical. Or for that matter, poetic. I think the poetic (for which my poetry does not stand), is the primary co(oper)mpeting cognitive process to the logical, and is everymuch as ubiquitous in daily life. Moreover, philosophy is well within its rights to employ the same. Such that, when an argument is criticized for being poetic, rather than logical, there is still philosophical response. Perhaps in terms of the ironies of conceit, which is to say metaphysic. To assume logic supervenes wisdom is a nebulous claim. None of which, of course, implies logic is demeaned.
The Hunting of the Snark captures the truth, I think, in this regard. Logic galore. Poetic extravaganza. And yet inversive of both, in some ‘sense’.
But that’s exactly what I mean by verification. It’s the induction problem. How do I know that the sun will rise tomorrow? A layman may answer, “Because it did yesterday, and the day before that since the dawn of … well, dawn.” I’ll say, “What does yesterday have anything to do with tomorrow?” A scientist may explain to me the orbital trajectory of the Earth and our relative observation of the sun. But I’ll say, “Show me causality. What does it look like?” He won’t be able to; there’s no real way of explaining causality within causal terms. So these examples are analogy-based. They lend to ever-probabilistic inductions since we can never be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. All they can make us is safe to assume.
Hume would say that we get this contentment with assuming that the sun will rise tomorrow through habit, not through logic alone; for him “reason is inert.” No one is motivated to do anything with pure reason alone. All the scientist’s numbers will do me no good unless I’m indeed biologically susceptible to receiving them in a certain way. Someone who insists on reason for certainty might, for instance, starve to death, as they would not infer the benefits of food based on previous observations of nutrition. But hunger wouldn’t allow this.
Popper takes Hume a lot further. He says that not only is reason undergirded by passions, habits, and customs, but reason itself is passion, habit, and custom. A thousand observations of some event A coinciding with some event B does not allow one to logically infer that all A’s coincide with B’s. According to Poppy, if there is a sense in which humans accrue knowledge positively by experience, it is only by pivoting observations off existing conjectural theories pertinent to the observations, or off underlying cognitive schemas which unconsciously handle perceptions and use them to generate new theories. But these new theories advanced in response to perceived particulars are not logically “induced” from them. These new theories may be wrong. The myth that we induce theories from particulars is persistent because when we do this we are often successful, but this is due to the advanced state of our evolved tendencies. If we were really “inducting” theories from particulars, it would be inductively logical to claim that the sun sets because I get up in the morning.
I think that this is a lot of what you are trying to say.
Good answer. Are you sure you haven’t read Popper or Quine? You’re basically coming to the same conclusions on your own if not.
I agree on one hand wholeheartedly. On the other, I think that this is a very dangerous notion. It’s one of my issues with Nietzsche. But him aside, you say that it’s all an “aesthetic choice.” How is it a choice? In reality, after this systematic dismantling of reasoning we’ve committed, how can we honestly say that it is anything other than what “it” is? I agree with you on your qualifications of “it’s about which one holds correct FOR me - which one works for a given individual” as well as the fact that pragmatism plays a large role. So all in all, I think your general assertions on this thread are correct in both thrust and reasoning.
But I’d just like to define some limits. I’ll give two examples of how I think irrational behavior is good and bad, respectively. First: A Zen master and his disciple stand on a bridge over a tranquil creek. The disciple asks, “Master, what is the true nature of Zen?” The master responds by picking his disciple up and throwing him over the bridge (not hurting him severely) before walking away. Now why did the Zen master do this? Well, let me be clear: Zen masters in general are bat shit crazy. But that’s sort of the point. Zen has a lot to do with casting away dualistic thought and absolutist logic, even if that means behaving rather oddly at times. Just as you delineated, art, poetry, and meditation are all important features of this practice alongside limited exercises of logic. A buddha isn’t an illogical cretin; he/she’s as capable as any at rigorous discourse – he/she just doesn’t have to be all the time.
Second: This same line of thinking can and has fallen in pernicious hands. All you have to do is read 1984 and you’ll know what I mean. I think that the German Idealists and, later, authoritarian regimes of the two World Wars are paramount examples of “the end of reason” gone sour. Hegel brought about his zeitgeist and dialectics; Marx brought about his dialectical materialism, amoral and non-justice based socialism, and a holistic view of society; and Nietzsche brought about his ubermensche, will-to-power, and artist-tyrant. While I do think that the latter retains the most sophisticated ideas, it really is each of these philosophers’ radical backlashes against what they perceived to be a very threatening paradigm of nihilism that end with the Nazis and the Soviets. Europe was swept with ideologies pressing the importance of aesthetics above anything else. The master race, the proletariat, the philosopher king, it was all heralded against reasonable accounts of freer, more open societies. And why wouldn’t it? It fed into the greed and ambitions of immense egos like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, to name a few.
The problem is that you cannot come to the early realization that your logical, biological, and psychological tendencies are all necessarily predetermined and inevitable and then thereby charge yourself with the duty of consciously perpetuating them under your impression of how they should turn out. Marx materialized our bodies and minds and thus concluded the communist world that he so conceived of. But the premises are irrelevant; the Zen master himself would tell you that the appropriate reaction to such blatantly shocking facts is to chill out and calm down. The act of perpetuating what is deemed to be inevitable nature of the mind through the mind itself is entirely counterintuitive to it in the long run; how are things to evolve in such a case? The consciousness has no power to manage evolution; it is eternally subject to it. That’s why planned economies are generally hard to pull off and why police states are especially sucky.
Anywho, I’ll leave with the wise words of Walter Sobchak: “Nihilists? Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.”
yup - logic can become a tailchase - an endless one that uses up a whole lot of mental energy - - sometimes we as thinkers are just hamsters on wheels, getting our exercise - logic is grounded in a tautology, one defining a thing as being that which is equal to itself. x=x, in other words. meanwhile causation is itself a logical error that is nonetheless a true fact of the world (true, that is, by consensus, just like it is true that short of total cataclysm, the sun will rise tomorrow)
I vaguely recall reading excerpts of Popper years ago as an undergrad, but i couldn’t tell you a thing about what he thought - i’ve never read Quine, or Carnap for that matter.
well, it’s a choice, but it’s not always a conscious one - most people don’t have any practical reason to care about the circularity of their thought, they just believe what works for them - and so by default certain correlations become causations - my point about logic and truth is a very simple one: the two don’t always coincide.
yes, logic and wisdom don’t share any necessary connection either - as i believe Oughtist has astutely pointed out.
Sure, but it’s not fair to blame Hegel for Stalin - and i’m not pressing the importance of aesthetics ABOVE anything else, i’m simply pressing its importance.
determinism may be true, but it still makes sense to act as though we are free - consciousness is totally caught up in the evolutionary process as well, so it may have some power to manage evolution, as long as we make certain choices (and we can only make choices when we are acting as though free)- the question is on what basis do we decide? logic is part of the answer to that question, but only part.
great quote, great movie, well placed - but i must make the disclaimer that i am not advocating for nihilism - the point is NOT that nothing is true, it is that anything might be true
The answers have to come from you. You have no objective relationship with the data and knowledge you collect. Your constant interpretation of data means that you are involved in what you are studying about man; there is no separate entity. It is the interpreter that is of the greatest importance.
Man has to understand himself first. Are the data and knowledge and the theories you derive going to help in this regard? From the point of view of knowledge, there is no way of understanding yourself. The computer machine never asks itself, “How am I functioning?” Really understanding yourself demands not the mere accumulation of data, but a quantum jump. Your data about human individualism and uniqueness bars your looking at things, including yourself, anew.