Any comments on this?
“his ontological argument of non-contradiction and general approach to sciences are far superior to these empiricist wankers.”
Descartes, mind you, was not an empiricist but an extreme rationalist over and above even Aristotle. Descartes was even wrapped up in Aristoteleanism because of his scholastic training by Jesuits. Kant would not be described as an empiricist either.
Francis Bacon said it best, though, that there is nothing to pure reason or pure empiricism. There is no constest between the two. One needs both. Pure reason opens up to speculation about nonsense which can continue forever. Hence, the religious appropriation of Aristotle and Plato. Which is destroyed even before the philosophers by Galileo and others. While empiricism makes one blind to what you are even percieving. But together…
“Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.”
I think because of these observations, we can take it for granted today that we need both. But there is always the strawman of people being pure empiricists or pure rationalists. Usually without knowing the meaning of the term or knowing the nuances of individual methodologies. But it is something to consider.
Thanks for responding. I’m glad you did because this clears up some questions. When I don’t respond to our debates, that is not meant as ‘weaseling out’, but as conceding your point and/or retreating for further thought. You are probably the most insightful poster I have read in a long time, or ever; changing my mind on a number of issues. Your points about fascism are obviously right. And your points about classical liberalism are too, as far as I can tell. It’s just that all this is very counterintuitive at first. Who’s a leftist, what’s a species of liberalism, and what’s not, etc. If I want to understand this, where should I start reading?
Nice paper, I took a quick glance. I take exception to the idea that the “laws of logic” are “absolutely certain.” The supposed argument from irrefutability, for example, is circular… it says that you cannot deny the LNC because in so doing, you also affirm it. But in denying the LNC you are no longer restricted from also affirming it since you do not hold true and false to be distinguishable… it is only by first assuming that true and false must be distinguishable (LNC) that you can assert that there is a problem with both affirming and denying LNC. It should be obvious from the axiomatic (unjustifiable) nature of the LNC and other “laws” of logic that no argument can be given why they must be believed. I’ve always been baffled by attempts to demote axioms to the level of theorems by giving arguments or “proofs” for them. An axiom is an axiom precisely because no argument does or can exist to support it.
Clayton -
Creating elaborate mythologies to predict phenomena can, in principle, be as effective as postulating inanimate elementary particles. There is no conceptual scheme that is true in itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism).
The naturalization of epistemology is, in my opinion, a brilliant move. From our sensory receptors to belief-formation is a long but physical process, and the more we study the neural networks involved, the more we understand how theory emerges from evidence (and how widely the two can diverge).
With analytic philosophers like Quine championing a rigorously logico-mathematical, scientific inquiry into our world, I find it odd to claim such thinkers are “attacking” reality or reason.
The point is, Clayton, that the logical law of non-contradiction is a consequence of metaphysical/ontological non-contradiction; and that is a simple fact: nothing would count as real or as experience if it was not ontologically non-contradictory.