Reasonable Belief

DrWho · **#341** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 3:33 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:You think that jedi mind shit would work on this caster bolt I stripped today? I bought a 600 lb tool cart for my pen collection and fucked up one of the legs.

What are you talking about? Does tihs have anything to do with our discussion?

LucidFlight · **#342** by **LucidFlight** » Feb 05, 2012 3:37 am

Cito di Pense wrote:
DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:So if I were to agree with your statement about perception where would you go next with it? I have stated a small part of my case for not accepting it without caveats but that may not be necessary.

Well, I think grasping the nature of reason can be done the same way we grasp the meaning of color - we attempt to grasp what different instances of reason have in common. It's not that difficult.

I think it's early days yet. First we must grasp the meaning of grasping. I use the 'spoon' example as my lesson. The first stage of bending the spoon is grasping it, probably with a pair of pliers. If your grip is strong enough to bend the spoon without the use of auxiliary instruments, your hands are better put to use elsewhere.

Sometimes, I see the nature of reason as a beautiful, light, early morning mist, its tiny droplets sprinkling ever so delicately across the face of experience. Other times, it is the red and purple mist of war against misrepresentation.

LucidFlight · **#343** by **LucidFlight** » Feb 05, 2012 3:52 am

Through the blurry fog of heavy reasoning, the now mutable spoon is fundamentally shapeless, able to contort upon the swirling, unseen forces that betray our perceptions. Grasp not at the fog, but feel yourself amongst its embrace. It clouds the already clouded senses, consuming you as one. Be now at one with the cloud. Be it! The spoon becomes clear.

Jeffersonian-marxist · **#344** by **Jeffersonian-marxist** » Feb 05, 2012 7:58 am

DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:So if I were to agree with your statement about perception where would you go next with it? I have stated a small part of my case for not accepting it without caveats but that may not be necessary.

Well, I think grasping the nature of reason can be done the same way we grasp the meaning of color - we attempt to grasp what different instances of reason have in common. It's not that difficult.

The very tone and structure of your posts betrays your biases and your method. Analytic types do philosophy like it was done in the seventeenth century, and are only allowed to do so because they're tradition, our tradition, has to a striking degree ignored Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In fact if you had "read" any of those three, your questions of "grasping" and "color" would fall to the wayside.

Perhaps it's why philosophy gets such a bad rap: people think philosophy is about buying and intro book and giving your opinion about free will, or waxing about the merits and demerits of utilitarianism.

SpeedOfSound · **#345** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 9:52 am

Ahh but the crackling bolts of slivering reason charging mightily through the rattling rain of our confusion...

(Do NOT grasp those! :shock:

)

SpeedOfSound · **#346** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 10:48 am

DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:So if I were to agree with your statement about perception where would you go next with it? I have stated a small part of my case for not accepting it without caveats but that may not be necessary.

Well, I think grasping the nature of reason can be done the same way we grasp the meaning of color - we attempt to grasp what different instances of reason have in common. It's not that difficult.

It's more difficult then you think. That's why we need to look deeper into how we know red. But you are righter than I suspect you know about the similarity here.

I don't ever lean what red is in any specific way. I can run into some red, or some reason, and I can be very certain that this is indeed the right stuff. But I can run into a whole mess of colors that I am not so sure about. When I try and put boundaries to it or define it precisely it all gets shaky. Colors are real favorites of philosophy because they are weird attachments to objects that have other properties but we can't attach it without an object. It is clear that we can't define a color. It is not so clear that things like reason have no actual definition.

SpeedOfSound · **#347** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 10:54 am

You can offer a definition of reason and I will look at it and see that it has no meaning regardless without the other art of all this. You make a move in a game by offering a definition and I actively read the definition and make my move. There is an activity in any reading or in any sensing of the color. The activity is my association with my entire past in relation to what is offered or sensed. In that complex cloud of active association something inside me settles into something that feels like understanding.

DrWho · **#348** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 5:14 pm

SpeedOfSound wrote:
It's more difficult then you think. That's why we need to look deeper into how we know red. But you are righter than I suspect you know about the similarity here.

I don't ever lean what red is in any specific way. I can run into some red, or some reason, and I can be very certain that this is indeed the right stuff. But I can run into a whole mess of colors that I am not so sure about. When I try and put boundaries to it or define it precisely it all gets shaky. Colors are real favorites of philosophy because they are weird attachments to objects that have other properties but we can't attach it without an object. It is clear that we can't define a color. It is not so clear that things like reason have no actual definition.

Yes, but you seem to concentrate exclusively on what is ambiguous. It's true that there are colors which are difficult to categorize, but there is an aspect to learning basic colors that is totally unambiguous. Every normal healthy child learns the meaning of red, yellow and green without significant difficulty. You can see a successful application of learning color at every stop light. Green means go, yellow means slow down and red means stop. If the program were as ambiguous as you suggest, then learning basic colors would be virtuallly impossible and we'd have more accidents.

So, here's a suggestion:

Let's distinguish between the ambiguous and the unambigous in this effort to define reason.

DrWho · **#349** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 5:19 pm

SpeedOfSound wrote:You can offer a definition of reason and I will look at it and see that it has no meaning regardless without the other art of all this. You make a move in a game by offering a definition and I actively read the definition and make my move. There is an activity in any reading or in any sensing of the color. The activity is my association with my entire past in relation to what is offered or sensed. In that complex cloud of active association something inside me settles into something that feels like understanding.

Your just talking about reason. But what about all the other terms in the above paragraph? Are all those terms ambiguous as well?

If all meaning is so ambiguous, then how can you know what you are talking about?

SpeedOfSound · **#350** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 5:56 pm

DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:You can offer a definition of reason and I will look at it and see that it has no meaning regardless without the other art of all this. You make a move in a game by offering a definition and I actively read the definition and make my move. There is an activity in any reading or in any sensing of the color. The activity is my association with my entire past in relation to what is offered or sensed. In that complex cloud of active association something inside me settles into something that feels like understanding.

Your just talking about reason. But what about all the other terms in the above paragraph? Are all those terms ambiguous as well?

If all meaning is so ambiguous, then how can you know what you are talking about?

Imagine a cloud with varying density. Say the middle is almost black. Now imagine such clouds for different things having some overlap in a way that is not strictly a Cartesian plane.

DrWho · **#351** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 6:01 pm

SpeedOfSound wrote:
DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:You can offer a definition of reason and I will look at it and see that it has no meaning regardless without the other art of all this. You make a move in a game by offering a definition and I actively read the definition and make my move. There is an activity in any reading or in any sensing of the color. The activity is my association with my entire past in relation to what is offered or sensed. In that complex cloud of active association something inside me settles into something that feels like understanding.

Your just talking about reason. But what about all the other terms in the above paragraph? Are all those terms ambiguous as well?

If all meaning is so ambiguous, then how can you know what you are talking about?

Imagine a cloud with varying density. Say the middle is almost black. Now imagine such clouds for different things having some overlap in a way that is not strictly a Cartesian plane.

That's completely ambiguous [according to you]

You seem to have faith in ambiguity.

DrWho · **#352** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 6:13 pm

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Imagine a cloud with varying density. Say the middle is almost black. Now imagine such clouds for different things having some overlap in a way that is not strictly a Cartesian plane.

Imagine that you are victim of post modern confusion.

SpeedOfSound · **#353** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 6:20 pm

DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:
DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:You can offer a definition of reason and I will look at it and see that it has no meaning regardless without the other art of all this. You make a move in a game by offering a definition and I actively read the definition and make my move. There is an activity in any reading or in any sensing of the color. The activity is my association with my entire past in relation to what is offered or sensed. In that complex cloud of active association something inside me settles into something that feels like understanding.

Your just talking about reason. But what about all the other terms in the above paragraph? Are all those terms ambiguous as well?

If all meaning is so ambiguous, then how can you know what you are talking about?

Imagine a cloud with varying density. Say the middle is almost black. Now imagine such clouds for different things having some overlap in a way that is not strictly a Cartesian plane.

That's completely ambiguous [according to you]

You seem to have faith in ambiguity.

Either everything is well defined or it is completely undefined or it is somewhere in the middle. You like to pick red for the same reason I like to pick reddish-orange. Only I don't disallow the other possibles. What's with the black and white thinking?

DrWho · **#354** by **DrWho** » Feb 05, 2012 8:51 pm

SpeedOfSound wrote:
DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:
DrWho wrote:

Your just talking about reason. But what about all the other terms in the above paragraph? Are all those terms ambiguous as well?

If all meaning is so ambiguous, then how can you know what you are talking about?

Imagine a cloud with varying density. Say the middle is almost black. Now imagine such clouds for different things having some overlap in a way that is not strictly a Cartesian plane.

That's completely ambiguous [according to you]

You seem to have faith in ambiguity.

Either everything is well defined or it is completely undefined or it is somewhere in the middle. You like to pick red for the same reason I like to pick reddish-orange. Only I don't disallow the other possibles. What's with the black and white thinking?

I have not denied areas of ambiguity. You are misrepresenting what I actually said.

So, here's a suggestion:

Let's distinguish between the ambiguous and the unambigous in this effort to define reason.

For instance, do you think deductive reasoning is an ambigious case of rationality or not.?

SpeedOfSound · **#355** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 9:39 pm

DrWho wrote:
I have not denied areas of ambiguity. You are misrepresenting what I actually said.

I guess I must of. Answer my detailed post again and be more detailed.

SpeedOfSound · **#356** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 05, 2012 9:55 pm

DrWho wrote:So, here's a suggestion:

Let's distinguish between the ambiguous and the unambigous in this effort to define reason.

For instance, do you think deductive reasoning is an ambigious case of rationality or not.?[/quote]

Kind of the opposite. I think deductive reasoning is a formalized subset of reasoning and deductive logic schematics are a pure formalization of that.

Math is one place where there is no fuzz in the definitions. I can't think of any others right now. Maybe science. Need coffee to think about it.

SpeedOfSound · **#357** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 06, 2012 12:30 am

DrWho wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:
It's more difficult then you think. That's why we need to look deeper into how we know red. But you are righter than I suspect you know about the similarity here.

I don't ever lean what red is in any specific way. I can run into some red, or some reason, and I can be very certain that this is indeed the right stuff. But I can run into a whole mess of colors that I am not so sure about. When I try and put boundaries to it or define it precisely it all gets shaky. Colors are real favorites of philosophy because they are weird attachments to objects that have other properties but we can't attach it without an object. It is clear that we can't define a color. It is not so clear that things like reason have no actual definition.

Yes, but you seem to concentrate exclusively on what is ambiguous. It's true that there are colors which are difficult to categorize, but there is an aspect to learning basic colors that is totally unambiguous. Every normal healthy child learns the meaning of red, yellow and green without significant difficulty. You can see a successful application of learning color at every stop light. Green means go, yellow means slow down and red means stop. If the program were as ambiguous as you suggest, then learning basic colors would be virtuallly impossible and we'd have more accidents.

So, here's a suggestion:

Let's distinguish between the ambiguous and the unambigous in this effort to define reason.

I'll try again. You can tell what red is. We know it when we see it. But we can't define it. We learn it by a statistics over time. Across culture there may be some variation in what are called out as the main colors also.

Now with a concept like reason we are in a concept space where there are many relationships to other concepts. We can offer various definitions but again it is similar to color in that we learn the concept over many samples of different situations. It's a little fuzzy. Actually if it were not it would be of limited use.

All words and sensations and things are like this. Because WE are like this.

So when you claim we know red I agree but if you claim you can define it or anything else with the precision of mathematics then I disagree with you. There are probably exceptions but I can't think of any so I leave it to you to provide those. Also if you think you can provide a solid universal definition I will keep an open mind.

DrWho · **#358** by **DrWho** » Feb 06, 2012 3:27 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Kind of the opposite. I think deductive reasoning is a formalized subset of reasoning and deductive logic schematics are a pure formalization of that.

That is the most complicated answer I have ever heard! You are waaay over complicating the issue. Deductive Reasoning is as common as the color red. Scientists use it everyday. Engineers use it everyday. Common sense people use it everyday. It's a pretty simple schema.

What on earth do you mean by "deductive reasoning is a formalized subset of reasoning"?

How can you define deductive reasoning as a subset of reasoning when you can't even define reason? Even worse, you seem to think that reason is undefinable.

Here is the commonly understood meaning of deductive reasoning:

Deductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypotheses. A deductive argument is valid if the conclusion does follow necessarily from the premises, i.e., the conclusion must be true provided that the premises are true. A deductive argument is sound if it is valid and its premises are true. Deductive arguments are valid or invalid, sound or unsound. Deductive reasoning is a method of gaining knowledge. An example of a deductive argument:

1.All men are mortal
2.Socrates is a man
3.Therefore, Socrates is mortal

The first premise states that all objects classified as "men" have the attribute "mortal". The second premise states that "Socrates" is classified as a man – a member of the set "men". The conclusion states that "Socrates" must be mortal because he inherits this attribute from his classification as a man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

The meaning of a deductive argument is simple not complex.

DrWho · **#359** by **DrWho** » Feb 06, 2012 3:36 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
So when you claim we know red I agree but if you claim you can define it or anything else with the precision of mathematics then I disagree with you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red

Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm.[2]

SpeedOfSound · **#360** by **SpeedOfSound** » Feb 06, 2012 3:42 am

DrWho wrote:
What on earth do you mean by "deductive reasoning is a formalized subset of reasoning"?

I mean deductive reasoning doesn't seem to cover the whole of kinds of reasoning. So subset. To be properly deductive it has to be formalized and follow the schema. So formal.

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