Ecmandu wrote:You missed my whole point. I can write a syllogism that states that:
1.) “repeatedly adding one to a sequence a 1 that doesn’t stop”
2.) if you can’t count it, then you can’t be sure it doesn’t stop
I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with it and logically proved the grounds of my disagreement. Just because you don't like my disproof of your point, doesn't mean I missed the point or that I'm wrong.
I think you ought to learn a bit about syllogisms before you trash them for getting in the way of your "intuitions". You don't just state a couple of claims and call it a syllogism - there's a specific form that a syllogism follows. E.g. you could have said:
P1. It is possible to repeatedly add 1 to a sequence
P2. Not being able to complete repeated addition is insufficient proof that it goes on infinitely
C1. Repeated addition of 1 to a sequence can't be sufficiently proven to go on infinitely
At least then you'd have a valid syllogism - but it still wouldn't be sound because premise 2 isn't true.
It might be the case that you personally will only regard "what you can directly experience" as proof, but the conclusion I provided relies on the notion of "don't stop". You could be strictly pragmatic and claim that in practice nobody can live forever to successfully perform "not stopping", but if you accept the theoretical possibility of "not stopping" aside from practical limitations of actually doing it (and empirically confirming the reasoning), then the conclusion is necessarily true by virtue of the valid logic structured in my syllogism.
But humans already had the Empiricism vs Rationalism bout a few hundred years ago.
Personally I acknowledge the importance of the
experience of "intuition" as a kind of "internal check" as to whether something really is or isn't logical. The experience is a kind of familiar feeling based on previous experience of logic. On a psychological level, this is in fact the best that humans can do on a maximally individual level with regard to logic, but the sociological experience of dialectically refining your intuitions of "logic" cannot be ignored - because it distinguishes "I'm right because of the experience of intuition alone" from "I'm right because of sociologically tempered experience of intuition". The latter is how everyone learns the language and thought processes to mentally encompass "logic" and "intuition" in the first place, and is ultimately the only way to
best intuit the effectiveness of your own intuitions with regard to logic. There's a basic failure on your part to constructively participate in the social refining of your intuitions in relation to logic.
Ecmandu wrote:I know silhouette, I know the way your mind works with your ego. I know this is anathema to you. Syllogisms don’t work. It’s all intuition. Me, being an objectivist, understands how frustrating that is to you.
Being able to confidently and competently disassemble someone's point, to highlight the flaws that make it wrong, doesn't mean you have an "ego" - no matter how resentful you might feel for having it done to you.
It would be possible for someone to be motivated to try and prove you wrong because they had an ego, but there are many other motivations to want to do this. As such, concluding that an "ego" is involved is known as "abductive reasoning", which is basically just "jumping to conclusions". I'm sure this fits in just fine with your "intuitionism", where basically anything goes as long as
you suspect it. Convenient, huh?
It would also be possible for someone to have such faith in their own intuitions as you do because they have an "ego". Observe as I do not now jump to this conclusion before logically verifying it - i.e. completely casting off anything to do with my own "ego" in favour of being impartial and objective.
An "intuitionist", such as you are modelling yourself to be, is basically the opposite of an "objectivist". Objectivism (n.b. not the Ayn Rand nonsense) is what I'm doing - being objective. I don't want to downplay the value of intuition - intuitions often turn out to be correct, but to stick to the scientific method to confirm if they turn out to be correct or not, you can only draw upon intuitions as far as your hypothesis. From then on, you devise an experiment to isolate independent variables against which to measure your hypothesis objectively, acknowledging as many caveats as you can as to the accuracy and reliability of doing so. You then take nothing more than the data you've gathered to inform your conclusions. Only in your evaluation can you then compare your objective findings to your intuitions to detemine whether they really were correct or not.
All of the above is cold hard fact. Any injection of "ego" into the mix is on your part alone. It's your right to indulge in "psychological projection" if that's what you're doing, but as for me - if I could get everyone else to focus only on the contents of my arguments instead of me as a person, I would. "Me" is 100% irrelevant, if I may have so much of an ego to claim such an egotistical sentiment.
Anyway - it's a stretch, but I'm gonna claim this is all still on topic to the extent that it challenges the form of syllogisms themselves, and addresses attitudes towards syllogisms, when syllogism was a main feature of the OP...
