I’ll go ahead and do the reduction. Why do we need a method to keep us connected to reality? Because our thoughts don’t automatically conform to reality. Why do our thoughts need to conform to reality? Reality is the standard of what’s true. Why is reality the standard of what’s true? Because existence has primacy. Primacy means to come before or be a precondition. Undoubtably, reality does not conform to conscious wishes or intentions. Is this fact self-evident? Yes it is. It’s a fact that anyone can test at any time and at any place. Every toddler know this fact, even if only implicitly. The jar of cookies will not float down to where he can get into it no matter how much he stomps his feet and cries and wants it to. The cookie jar will remain where it is, out of reach. Can we take this reduction further? While the primacy of existence is an axiomatic principle, it still rests on more basic knowledge, namely the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity. It is a corollary truth to these three fundamental, conceptually irreducible concepts. There, I’ve reduced the concept of logic to the starting point of all knowledge. We’ve taken the reduction as far as we can. Can we use logic to do this? We just did. If you reverse this reduction back up the chain you will see that each step follows logically from the prior step. Self-evident truth (existence, identity, consciousness) to a corollary truth (the primacy of existence), corollary to derived truth. It all goes back to the axiom of Identity/existence (they are the same). We need a method to guide our thinking to keep us always in contact with reality by non-contradictory identification of facts because the facts of reality have primacy over our feelings, want, desires, etc. Logic is the volitional adherence to the primacy of existence principle. If existence didn’t exist as a primary absolute, then there would be no need for logic; it would be useless. Reality would conform to our thoughts. Whatever we thought would be true resulted in contradictions.
I don’t see any formal logic here. By your reasoning, animals must be using logic. In a sense they are. But I thought we were talking about formal, structural metaphysics.
Of course you don’t. That’s because it’s an inductive chain. Philosophy is inductive. We perceive directly that A is A, that things are what they are and do what they do, independent of consciousness. Logic recognizes these fundamentals and uses them to guide us to understanding. It follows directly from A is A that contradictions can’t exist (law of non-contradiction, corollary. truth). It follows directly from the law of non-contradiction that if we want truth, we can’t accept contradictions. It follows directly from this that we need a method of non-contradictory reasoning. We’ve used logic the whole way, but not to deduce. We started with formal structured metaphsics in the formal recognition that reality exists, it is composed of facts (entities in context), that reality has primacy. Therefore, it can’t be altered by conscious will, that contradictions can’t exist in reality, that reality is a non-contradictory whole, and that knowledge of reality must be a non-contradictory whole. That man is not infallible; that he needs some objective method of reasoning. All of these facts lead not only to logic but to its epistemic necessity.
My reading tells me that 4-valued logic, where propositions are “True, False, Both, or Neither”, and contradictions are allowed and do not break the system (an example of “paraconsistent logic”), has come in handy for dealing with sets of data that have inconsistencies.
Classical logic is still the McDaddy though.
Our thoughts need not and probably cannot conform to reality itself; only to a ‘template’ of reality. Compare, for instance, Microsoft Windows as it appears on your monitor with the machine language behind it (ones and zeros, or rather bit pulses and the lack thereof). Our sensations are like the things we see on the monitor, and these, in turn, are (supposedly) caused by the ‘bit pulses’ of reality. In order for us to survive, then, our thoughts must cohere in a way that the real us behave in such a way as not to clash too hard with the rest of reality.
It sounds like you are saying this template hangs in between reality and our perceptual faculty. But where does this template come from, and is it universal across all human minds?
I’d say it is our perceptual faculty, or at least our sensory perception apparatus. This, in my view, hangs in between our minds (thoughts) and reality (the physical). More precisely, it’s a part of physical reality and thus “comes from” the rest of physical reality. But it can never directly perceive itself—for instance, your left eye can never directly behold itself. So our sensory apparatus is a part of reality that hangs between our minds and the rest of reality. It’s similar across all humans, but never exactly the same.
This came from my other thread, I think it was accidentally posted there instead.
I think we need to argue for pretty much everything to be honest. Rejecting the law of excluded middle (A or not-A) leads to a whole class of logics called intuitionistic logics. Rejecting the law of noncontradiction leads to a class of logics called paraconsistent logic. Rejecting the law of identity is more rare, but apparently it leads to a type of logic called Schrodinger logic.
Even trying to argue against the most basic propositions like “Something exists” can be an interesting rhetorical exercise, as Gorgias showed.
We should in theory be prepared to argue everything, in my view, and let the strengths and weaknesses of each side of the question be apparent.
In saying that, some positions are so self-refuting that you will sound like a fool arguing them. One of my favourite examples is trying to argue “Language is meaningless”.
I think some positions, such as logical nihilism and radical skepticism, are really weak; yet they do have defenders. I can’t just shut my eyes and pretend there aren’t people trying to argue for them. And even if they don’t convince me of their position in the slightest, they still may say something interesting.
Then you are setting up an infinite regress of arguments. That’s why you must start with fundamental, perceptually self-evident, conceptually irreducible facts. The fact that existence exists is conceptually irreducible, i.e., it doesn’t rest on any prior premises. So, too, is the axiom or law of identity, A is A. It can not be proved because it isn’t the conclusion of prior reasoning. It’s a necessary precondition of any reasoning.
The problem with humans is that they refuse to understand the meaning of human words. Anyone who argues or asserts anything need only be asked what a few words of his argument mean. That’s it. The animal, and this is an animal that has memorized how words sound and are spelled, will be stumped but will continue to insist. The cattle will not realize that he is this stubborn animal that only superficially resembles a human being. If definitions are given, the cattle will reject them, because these definitions do not correspond at all to the images that the animal has imagined, or has received through education. Do you want to see for yourself? What is meaning? Everything has to make sense. You have no definition.
Meaning is a two-way relationship between the thinking object and the universe as a thinking subject, which includes all possible forms of thinking. What have you learned? Nothing. That’s very funny.
This post is in reply to Self-Lightening. I forgot use the quote function. To continue. If this template exists and is our perceptual equipment, then it necessarily conforms to reality. Remember no contradictions. And if our thoughts conform to the template then they necessarily conform to reality.
Logically you need self-evident premises or axioms, some of which will correspond to facts and some of which will not, but our selection of axioms is subject to meta-logical dialogue. My recommendation of arguing for things is more methodological rather than an ontological theory. I don’t disagree with you that we should believe in the law of identity and the other two laws, I think classical logic is way better than the alternatives. But you shouldn’t call something a necessary precondition of reasoning if people have literally developed ways to do reasoning without it.
Just because people have devised other systems does not mean those systems are valid. If these two systems, classical logic and these alternative systems, come to different conclusions, how do we choose which one is right? Do we pick the one that is grounded in existence, facts, and non-contradiction, or do we pick the one that drops the very premises that make reasoning possible?
Other than a couple applications in physics and computing, classical logic does everything. You would be hard-pressed to establish that classical logic should be replaced by non-classical logic. The debate then becomes whether classical logic is right and non-classical logic is wrong, or whether they can in some sense both be right. This is a debate between logical monism and logical pluralism.
Debate presupposes classical logic. People can and have developed alternative logics that are internally coherent, But without metaphysical commitments, they are floating over nothing. While the reduction I did clearly grounds classical logic in reality.
You’re probably right. Nevertheless there is a literature on this question.
Note that even if non-classical logic is clearly wrong, it is not useless. So your views on the matter should be nuanced enough to make room for innovation.
If everyone had taken a hard line that Euclid was obviously right about geometry, we would not have the math that was needed for relativity.
Alright; despite that different logics are suited to different contexts, I am willing to grant that there is a single correct logic that most accurately reflects the metaphysics of reality, on the grounds that reality must be one way that is consistent with itself and that if two logical systems recommend incompatible inferences they can’t both be right, even if they are both internally consistent.
We must be explicit that in granting this, we are choosing to reject logical pluralism in favour of logical monism.
Furthermore, in order to do this, we must also reject pragmatism.
Pragmatism could be its own thread, or its own book, but all I will say about that is that pragmatism confuses truth with utility.
We hold that usefulness is not the defining characteristic of truth.
So we can now use classical logic and assume our conclusions are true. What next?
I suggest we reconsider the concept of a priori truths: truths we can know by reason alone, without the need for experience.
Firstly, are there a priori truths?
Well, no. From Merleau-Ponty and others we know our senses are themselves ‘intentionally’ selective etc. Nietzsche renders this by using the Kantian term “understanding” (Verstand), saying it “logicizes” the chaos of sensations (WP 569). So the principles of non-contradiction etc. are themselves imposed on our sense data. Still, all of these things are part of reality, of course (supposing there’s something beyond “our” mind(s)).
I can finally say I’ve thought it over and yes I agree. Existence, reality, or being is the most fundamental thing. (Existence is the predicate of things that are real, reality is the domain of all that exists, and being refers to the “is-ness” as such.)
(This includes fictional and imaginary entities, as ideas.)
In asking what is most fundamental, the only question that matters is what presupposes what? If something is an ontological precondition for something else, and not vice versa, then it is more fundamental.
This has to be disentangled from questions such as “What is more important?”, “What is more valuable?”, or “What is better?” Quarks are more fundamental than children; you can have quarks without a child but you can’t have a child without quarks. And yet we probably want to say that a child is more important than a random collection of quarks.
Similarly, we probably want to say that wisdom is more valuable than intelligence that has no wisdom or is destructive. Yet wisdom is an emergent phenomenon that has many more ingredients, and as such it is less fundamental. Intelligence is more fundamental than wisdom. Knowledge is more fundamental than wisdom. Cognition is more fundamental than wisdom. And yet wisdom is more desirable than any of these things on their own.
Similarly, I think there’s a case to be made that love, which is touted as the supreme spiritual reality, is not more fundamental than survival - but it is better than mere survival.
Truth as standardly defined depends on truth-bearers, typically propositions, and these propositions must represent reality. There are things beyond truth as understood that way, such as direct experience which is not really propositional. That is why it seems clear reality itself is more fundamental than truth.
I exclude God for the simple reason I don’t think we can show there is a God in the sense of a perfect being with the classical omni attributes, and especially infinite love and everything. If we can’t show such a being is real, how can we say it’s more fundamental than truth or reality itself? But I’m inclined to say we should take seriously the possibility that there is a God, for the simple reason that God would be infinitely important if God exists.
What about the opposite of being, absolute nothingness? I think such a thing is logically impossible. For it to be the case that nothing exists, it must be true that nothing exists; there must be something about which it is the case that nothing exists. This is incoherent. Such a situation must be a situation, and there must be propositions that accurately describe it or not. So I don’t think there was any possibility of absolutely nothing existing. There might be a world with no physical objects in it, if such a thing is coherent, but that would still be a particular kind of world.
It follows from that that there is metaphysically necessary being, which brings God questions back.
As far as what is important, as opposed to fundamental, I think value itself could be what is important. But value requires meaning in order to be contextualized. And value and meaning together provide purpose. I will keep pondering on that.