By induction. Self-evident truths (existence, identity, consciousness) - Corollary truth (the primacy of existence) - inductively derived truth: If existence is primary, and man is capable of straying from reality in his thinking (fallibility), then a method is needed to keep one’s thinking connected to reality. Aristotle said that our perception can not be wrong, but we can make mistakes in our reasoning. In other words nobody departs from reality at the perceptual level of consciousness. All derivative knowledge, such as the principles of logic, must be reducible to self-evident facts. That’s called integration, and it is the overlooked part of reasoning.
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So far: existence exists.
Namely, experience as existence.
Whoa
thats a massive amount of steps you just took there in one leap.
What is the difference between “reality” and “not reality” if the sole criterium for existence we’ve discerned so far, is experience?
The only self evident fact we have so far is: there is experience.
:
Let me give it a shot myself.
Singular self-evident fact: Experience
First appearance: equivalence. Namely, of experience ‘inside’ and ‘world’ - ‘outside’. Distinction of subject and object.
Note, this is already no longer self-evident fact.
You are right. I’m going about this wrong. So let me try a different method and reduce logic to a self-evident truth. First, we need to say what logic is: a set of principles to guide one’s thinking to conformity with reality. Do you accept this understanding of logic?
Nietzsche’s philosophy did not open up to me at first, until I went more deeply into this one:
You can make very good rational arguments in support of this one. All you need to do is show that it is possible that remaining ignorant of something or being delusional about something is better than knowing it. And there goes Truth, knocked off its pedestal as God. Of course, the conditions for when it is better not to seek truth, are themselves subject to truth. Nevertheless, I see why Nietzsche is so comfortable saying things like “there are no facts” and “truths are illusions” - he does not care whether it is rational to say this, he cares that it is life-affirming.
Whether his conception of life-affirming is one to be recommended remains to be shown.
Consequently I begin to get an idea of what postmodernism is about.
“Reality may be independent, but access to it is always mediated… Power controls these mediations: what questions can be asked, what counts as evidence, which interpretations become authoritative. In this sense, what is accepted as “truth” is often a function of who holds the power to define the discourse. Truth, as socially operative, is rarely separable from the structures of power… What counts as a “truth claim” is itself embedded in power-inflected discourses… Science is not immune to power… Scientific “truth” gains its authority not just from reality-testing, but from its place in a power structure… Truth, without power to amplify and defend it, gets ignored or suppressed.”
How are you going to assess what the correct definition of logic is? Are you going to use logic? Haha
Why is it funny, Josh? Do you think there is a problem in using logic to validate the definition of logic? There are rules of definition and they are inductive, not deductive so circularity is not an issue. Are you a presuppositionalist?
I’m laughing at the irony. I don’t think anything can be formally validated without logic. But a person may have to rely on a heuristic definition until they have acquired enough logical concepts and experience to systematically improve their definitions.
OK. I apologize if I got you confused with another poster who has been dialoging with me. My point is that on my view fundamental truths are the most important because so very much rests on them. Get them wrong and the whole framework dissolves.
Most famously, Kant made that distinction. But this distinction alone did not suffice for him to ‘overcome’ Hume. If there are only analytic a priori judgments and synthetic a posteriori ones, it’s just Hume’s relations between ideas and matters of fact. But Kant added synthetic a priori judgments, specifically the structure of our understanding. We can say things about experiences before having them, as our understanding always structures experiences in a certain way. Hegel, Darwin and Nietzsche then added the notion of historical development, taking away Kant’s universality of the structure of (human!) understanding. This makes even the apriority of analytic judgments relative to evolutionary contingency.
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I agree with you on this, and metaphysics is where we start because it is the study of those principles that are true for everything that exists.
I’ve been trying to make a list of fundamental propositions, and whether they should be affirmed or denied. It starts like this:
-Laws of thought: identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle. That is, classical logic or non-classical logic.
-Anti-psychologism or psychologism: Whether logic is psychological and subjective, or objective
-Metaphysical realism or anti-realism
-Epistemological realism or anti-realism
-Philosophical universalism or relativism. Factual relativism or realism.
-Whether axioms of mathematics are correct
-Whether skepticism is correct, or to what extent.
-What is knowledge? Is knowledge analyzable?
-Is solipsism or idealism correct? Or scientific realism?
-Is the past real?
-Getting back to logic: Is there one correct logic, multiple correct logics, or (as some try to argue…) no correct logics
-What is the most fundamental thing of all? Is it truth, being, something divine?
-Etc.
Existence is one of the most fundamental concepts, but you cannot even assess metaphysical claims without the logical and epistemological and linguistic tools to do so.
In my first thread on this forum, I made the assumption “There are good reasons to make statements”, and derived metaphysical and logical realist statements from that.
If “There are good reasons to make statements” is not correct, we might as well pack up and go home, because we can’t assert anything.
Some claims have that property, that they must be true, if anything can be said at all.
I would say that it is the most fundamental concept. What could be more fundamental than existence. You can’t drill down any further. I think there is a flaw in human beings. Perhaps it’s not a flaw but we learn of these fundamental truths before we reach the conceptual level of thought, and never go back and formally recognize them. In many ways everyone starts in mid-stream.
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The question of what is the most fundamental has a lot of proposed answers:
-Truth
-God
-Love
-Survival
-Power
-Meaning
-Experience
-Consciousness
-Goodness
-Wisdom
I think you are onto something though because truth beats a lot of these hands-down; and all truth is, according to the correspondence theory, is a correspondence with reality - which is the same thing as existence. It may also be called “Being”.
Yes, very good. It must always be remembered that Nietzsche was a philosopher and not, for example, a prophet; more precisely, that even insofar as he was or aspired to be a prophet, this was subordinate to his being a philosopher.
Now there are two relevant senses of “better” here (see Gay Science 344). Remaining ignorant or delusional can be better in an amoral sense—better for you, for your worldly power or pleasure, say—, and it can be better in a moral sense—but in this sense it’s actually worse (‘reverse better’—more evil).
Well, is that really what he cares about, or is that only what—at best—the prophet in him cares about? What drives him into building a worldview on the foundation of man’s irrefutable errors, in my view, is his insight into the limitations of his insight.
I’m reminded of Russel’s chapter on him, from which you quoted and which I did once read. But the thing is that he conceived a life-affirmation in which the most life-affirming life was afirmed… This, however, could only be the life which is least ignorant of the deadly truth—supposing that the truth is indeed ultimately deadly.
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All of those proposed truths presuppose existence. So for me there’s no contest. I don’t consider ‘God’ a valid concept at all. But the others all rest on existence.
Well it’s not quite as simple as that. I see logic as a means to create power within reality. But I just wanted to see if you could actually derive logic from from what is self-evident and irrefutable, the bare fact of experience.
I have had a lot of confusion on this fundamentality question and I’m taking some time to work out a firm answer. I’ll let you know if I agree when I have a conclusion. (PS: My answer won’t be God either.)
Please, take your time to chew on it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.