Posted: Jun 04, 2011 3:11 pm
Sweenith wrote:
examples of a priori knowledge: "2+2=4" "no bachelors are married" "all squares have four sides of equal length" those are knowable a priori, because they can be grasped via reason alone.
Incredible. What is prior to making those statements is knowing (or agreeing to) the defintions of 'addition', 'equality', 'bachelor', 'married', 'square', 'side' and 'length'. Having a definition of a geometric square is contingent on having seen or made an approximation of it on the ground. You can go with Kant, and say that space and time are prior to reason, but that's an observation, since humans evolved from bacteria.
Yes, you're coming at this from a philosophical POV, and like the notion that philosophers work things out from first principles. My view is that all those first principles come by way of the empirical. The best you can do is to suggest that it is reason that imposes order on the empirical, but that is an axiom, and not an a priori. Is the order there first? Can you say that evolution (of reasoning) is possible without some sort of prior order? Is that an observation or a deduction? If the latter, it is perhaps the self-evident axiom you are looking for, and it is not the foundation for philosophy, but for science.
I see no guarantee that the exercise of pure reason gives you anything but that, and you have to stop there, because you can't make your definitions do anything much by invention of definitions. If modus ponens works consistently, it is because there is consistency. It's not saying much.
Therefore, just because something is self-evident doesn't mean that it's necessarily true.
Well, that's bad for you, since the existing order in the universe will break down, according to the laws of entropy and high energy physics. Meh. There is not anything necessarily true, since no truth is not a statement. That's only a definition.
No I think God has created every existing thing about from himself, but I don't think he created the rules of logic (that seems to be an incoherent idea).
That's nice, Sweenith, but it is a nonsense statement about a nonsense entity. Kronecker's statement is ironic. Even if Kronecker actually believed in God, he only could use it as an axiom, and ironically so. IOW, if you want to talk about authentic a priori knowledge, you will need to talk about God, but that is nonsense. All you will have is connection between necessary truth and the word 'God'. Done with you.
So much for Aristotle's "ALL men by nature desire to know" (first line of the Metaphysics)
Yep. God has ordained it. If you find yourself having to talk about what is prior to everything else, you're doing theology, and not philosophy. Go to the Theism forum, or find somebody else to do it with, here. Theology does not involve the exercise of reason, but the construction of a lot of very trivial tautologies. Not interesting to me.
Sweenith wrote:I'd love to go without having to define the same old terms over and over, but then people just talk past one another.
Well, you won't find me trying to talk past you. I'm very plain spoken, am I not? Why did it take us so long to bring God into this? To say that such conversations are about God? You and I can have a conversation about something I will say is nonsense. Speculating about necessary truths is a preamble to discoursing about God. It's just that once we start talking about God, it is plain that we are talking about bullshit. Are we not plain-spoken?