Posted: Jul 29, 2011 5:06 am
DrWho wrote:Jef wrote:DrWho wrote:If one does not have faith that reason is useful, then what is the justification for using it?
No one can prove that reason is useful.
Thus I agrue that faith in the utility of reason is a necessary condition for being rational.
Which might be a reasonable argument, had you not already excluded reason from your epistemological toolkit.
Any purportedly rational argument against reason is incoherent. It is so meaningless it is not even wrong, because it excludes, for itself, the possibility of being shown to be correct.
How did I exclude reason?
If I am in a position where I am deciding whether or not to apply reason, I cannot justifiedly make the argument that I should use reason only if I have faith that it is useful, as this is an application of reason.
Moreover, without reason we have no definition for any of the terms we use to formulate the statement. We can have no rules which say that A is A, or A is not B. We can have no rules of syntax. That is, outside of a rational framework no statement can be said to have any meaning whatsoever, or rather statements are rendered meaningless as any construction is possible.