I’ve failed to grasp the discussion? That’s IT? That’s the best you’ve got? Well, it would be wonderful if you told me what it was I failed to grasp. Was there a flaw in my pointing out that Einstein used reasoning in his theories? Did I completely detach myself from what was being discussed when I said that you were attacking the act of reasoning from an entirely irrational premise? When, repeatedly, you have responded to arguments with gibberish like divine intervention, was I not grasping at something when I made that crack about Karl Marx? You know, about how he would often claim that his theories can’t be understood by people who…well, let’s pull no punches here, by people who disagree with him? You know, like you just did? Anyone can pretend they are having a substantial discussion by simply shrugging off contrariness with “Well, you don’t really get it.” If you can do no more than that, you have failed to grasp the very notion of discussion. You listen to your own voice and nothing more.
My apologies. I seem to have gotten carried away with silly reasoning on my part. What I meant to say was, “No I didn’t.” Now just respond with “Yes you did.” and we can go on to have a REAL discussion…
“Rationalism does indeed fail, but primarily because there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions”
wait..what?
“Rationalism does indeed fail, but primarily because there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions”
wait..what?
As an overall way to deal with the ‘analytic/synthetic’ dichotemy, the ‘problem of induction’ and scepticism in general a mixture of Wittgensteinian and Aristotlian theories of logic are sufficient. To put it most simply, there is no such thing as logic divorced from reality, reality divorced from logic or of a concept seperate from its ontological manifestivity, which includes the ability to recognize and apply a concept. Thus, there is no analytic/synthetic dichotemy. Propositional logic is merely an inherent aspect of conceptual reality, it does not form a seperate and unrelated category of reasoning.
There’s also Quine’s rejection, which is more in the form of analytic logic, in his paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
Liberte, I had been looking for some stuff about a connection between Aristotle and Wittgenstein recently and came across this paper. I guess Heidegger would also say there is no such thing as language divorced from being.
Interesting. I think the case is stronger than anti-antirealism, into actual realism; which derives from the elentics of ontological versus propositional statements. Also, as Long says in Wittgenstein, Economics, and the Logic of Action:
The fact that the logicality of thought involves measuring up to an extralinguistic standard does not mean that the logicality of thought consists in measuring up to an extral inguistic standard; realism does not entail reflectionism. (Realism can be rail-less and yet metaphysical.) Hence it is necessarily true, yet not vacuous, to say that thought corresponds to an independent reality.
Also, Jaako Hintikka on Aristotle’s unitarian concept of ‘being’ (contra the Frege-Russell view), from his book Analysis of Aristotle:
Further evidence of Aristotle’s rejection of the Frege-Russell thesis is easily forthcoming. This rejection means that he was operating with a unitarian concept of being. In the fullest sense, einai had to comprise all of the first three Frege-Russell senses of being, that is, predication, existence, and identity. This might seem to be paradoxical, for Aristotle like all sensible logicians must have realized that in some of its uses einai might be missing one or two of these components. Yet this would be a serious objection to my interpretation only if the different Frege-Russell senses were for Aristotle different meanings of einai. Then the absence of one of them would change the total meaning of this verb. Since the different Frege-Russell senses are for Aristotle only different components of a unitarian meaning one of them could be missing without affecting the basic meaning of the word. To make an instant comparison, the word ‘‘athletic’’ is likely to connote both strength and speed. Yet a weight lifter can be an athlete without being agile, and a sprinter can be fast without being strong. For the Aristotelian unitarian notion of being, it suffices that in principle there always could be the other component senses present, too. In the case of an occurrence of einai in Aristotle, the right question to ask is not which Frege-Russell sense he is using the word in, but rather which of the component meanings are present on that particular occasion. The possibility of there being several possible answers to the second question does not make Aristotle’s use of the word equivocal. In some case, a missing component force might be restored by means of collateral arguments. Indeed, it will be seen that in the atomic premises of an Aristotelian science the existential sense is initially absent but can be brought in via collateral arguments.