A distressing thought: is reason a valid tool with which to evaluate beliefs? I doubt that any argument could be made to the effect that reason is such a tool, without begging the question.
1) Do you think that your beliefs (or anyone's beliefs) that are being evaluated should have a rational basis? For example, if I believed that the moon was made of green cheese, there could be a rational way to refute that.
2) If you want to evaluate beliefs, what tool other than reason were you planning on using? It may not be perfect, but there aren't a lot of options that I can think of offhand, other than empirical proof.
Honestly, I get tired of people who claim their right to believe idiotic things because "that's just what I believe" or "it's my opinion". The truth is beliefs are not devoid of truth values, and can therefore be evaluated.
Hope you don't mind my commenting. I just miss talking phil with people. =] --Em
I don't understand response 1. Maybe this is related, maybe not: I invite you to give a rational argument to the effect that the moon is not made of green cheese and I will attempt to show where you have begged the question
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I think what I mean is that reason is a tool for evaluating belief if you happen to think that belief should be rational. A belief in (a) god is not inherently rational because there is no concrete proof of god, so reason cannot be used to evaluate that sort of belief
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Ok, now we have an example of reason being used as a tool to evaluate a belief (i.e. the belief that the moon is not made of green cheese). I asked for the argument because I think it will be easier to discuss this with a concrete example in mind. The problem is that there has been no justification for why reason is to be trusted. Your argument sounds good if I accept the rules of logic, but why should I accept those rules? I am having trouble answering this question without using logic itself: and to prove that logic is acceptable by using logic begs the question
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In reviewing premise 1, I are that it is presently weak. If I replace it with this: "Two tools for evaluating beliefs that do not have any sound justification will be equally useful" would you be satisfied?
A) You bring up that longer arguments are less trustworthy. I am inclined to agree, but I haven't thought about this very much. But this is not why I am challenging reason. An aside note: my housemate has told me that Dawkins brings this up in the God DelusionB) You bring up that you have observed that the world fits the model of sentences with truth values (a model called "logic") reasonably well, and to the extent that it fits this model we can say that logic is acceptable. This is, in some sense, what I am talking about; that is, I am questioning the ability of logic to correctly fit the real world. It seems that you justify reason on the basis of your observations/intuitions. But it seems that to justify something by use of observations/intuitions you must have done some reasoning about the trustworthiness of your
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Even that form of premise 1 is questionable. It's not obvious to me that how useful something is has much to do with how well it can be justified (and it has even less to do with how well it has been justified). There are certain things and facts that I use every day that I don't know the justifications of. Most engineers don't know the proof of Taylor's theorem, and yet they use it a whole lot. Mathematicians don't know for sure that the axioms they use are consistent, and yet use the fact that they are all the time
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I don't doubt that tools can be useful regardless of whether or not we know why they work. But I do doubt that tools (and, of course, we are not here speaking of physical tools) can be useful if they have no justification. I don't need to know the justification of avogadro's number to find it useful, but if it had no justification then I would doubt that it was useful (and if I knew that it had no justification I would stop using it).
You are absolutely right that I would respond that you are using reason to justify your observations. But further consider this objection: Can you think of any justification for trusting observations that does not beg the question? For example, if you observed in the past that your observations are reliable...then you have trusted your observations in order to prove the trustworthiness of your observations which begs the question. The only argument I can think of for the trustworthiness of observations that does not presuppose said trustworthiness is from Descartes's Meditations but that argument fails
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I guess I'm just not as distressed about this as you are because I have long been used to the idea that there are no complete justifications for anything. I'm pretty happy to assume the trustworthiness of my observations (some more than others, of course), because I have to start somewhere. Yes, we could all be "brains" in vats living in a simulated world, but I can live with assuming that we're not. Perhaps that's why I'm not much of a philosopher
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I think I might be going in circles by answering your points, so I'll leave it.
In answer to your last question, I don't think that our argument led to Descartes's demon. I was referring to Descartes's argument that God, being all good, would not deceive us, therefore we can trust our senses. But I don't think that our argument even led there because, although I mentioned it, I immediately dismissed it.
There is nothing fundamental about brains in vats, but it is popular enough that some people often refer to it because it communicates what is meant efficiently. If I came up with my own example I would have to explain it, whereas with certain popular examples, if the other person has already heard it, then it need not be explained. An attempt at a math analogy: it is like using the Pythagorean theorem instead of the law of cosines when working with right triangles.
bit of trivia: "lengthiness" was one of the words Webster put in the American dictionary that many scholars criticized. "What's next, 'strengthiness'?"
Not to criticize you, it is, by now, a very legitimate word; just sharing trivia.
green cheese has no sound justification, and no other form of justification, aside from its humorous value. reason may not have sound justification, but regardless it does have justification in that it is a functional method of evaluating beliefs, provided it is taken with a grain of salt. Therefore, green cheese and reason do not have equal justifications. Conclusion: there is no direct link between the usefulness of green cheese and the usefulness of reason in evaluating beliefs.
Seems to me you're just choosing to treat the issue in black-and-white terms to better serve your argument.
When given two beliefs with comparable consequences, what better method do you have to compare them? It seems to me that as long as reason is a valid form of evaluation relative to all others, it is justifiable to use it as such.
I am unsure what you mean when you say that reason is a "functional" method of evaluating beliefs. If by this you mean that it at least produces a result, then maybe we can inscribe an argument in a block of green cheese and then eat the cheese and then based on whether or not we fart afterwards, that determines the soundness of the belief (I would prefer the use of green soy-cheese, but I don't think that that exists). There: green cheese is a functional method. But I am unsure if I have interpreted "functional method" correctly, so I invite you to clarify this phrase.
validity and soundness are binary values. I dislike saying "black and white" in this context because that invokes a whole set of connotations that I don't think are relevant. Can you think of any argument that is neither sound nor not sound?
I do find your claim that reason is valid relative to other tools interesting. But I can find no justification for any level of validity for reason above any other tool. I challenge you to offer up a justification for the use of
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1) Do you think that your beliefs (or anyone's beliefs) that are being evaluated should have a rational basis? For example, if I believed that the moon was made of green cheese, there could be a rational way to refute that.
2) If you want to evaluate beliefs, what tool other than reason were you planning on using? It may not be perfect, but there aren't a lot of options that I can think of offhand, other than empirical proof.
Honestly, I get tired of people who claim their right to believe idiotic things because "that's just what I believe" or "it's my opinion". The truth is beliefs are not devoid of truth values, and can therefore be evaluated.
Hope you don't mind my commenting. I just miss talking phil with people. =]
--Em
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A) You bring up that longer arguments are less trustworthy. I am inclined to agree, but I haven't thought about this very much. But this is not why I am challenging reason. An aside note: my housemate has told me that Dawkins brings this up in the God DelusionB) You bring up that you have observed that the world fits the model of sentences with truth values (a model called "logic") reasonably well, and to the extent that it fits this model we can say that logic is acceptable. This is, in some sense, what I am talking about; that is, I am questioning the ability of logic to correctly fit the real world. It seems that you justify reason on the basis of your observations/intuitions. But it seems that to justify something by use of observations/intuitions you must have done some reasoning about the trustworthiness of your ( ... )
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You are absolutely right that I would respond that you are using reason to justify your observations. But further consider this objection: Can you think of any justification for trusting observations that does not beg the question? For example, if you observed in the past that your observations are reliable...then you have trusted your observations in order to prove the trustworthiness of your observations which begs the question. The only argument I can think of for the trustworthiness of observations that does not presuppose said trustworthiness is from Descartes's Meditations but that argument fails ( ... )
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In answer to your last question, I don't think that our argument led to Descartes's demon. I was referring to Descartes's argument that God, being all good, would not deceive us, therefore we can trust our senses. But I don't think that our argument even led there because, although I mentioned it, I immediately dismissed it.
There is nothing fundamental about brains in vats, but it is popular enough that some people often refer to it because it communicates what is meant efficiently. If I came up with my own example I would have to explain it, whereas with certain popular examples, if the other person has already heard it, then it need not be explained. An attempt at a math analogy: it is like using the Pythagorean theorem instead of the law of cosines when working with right triangles.
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Not to criticize you, it is, by now, a very legitimate word; just sharing trivia.
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reason may not have sound justification, but regardless it does have justification in that it is a functional method of evaluating beliefs, provided it is taken with a grain of salt.
Therefore, green cheese and reason do not have equal justifications.
Conclusion: there is no direct link between the usefulness of green cheese and the usefulness of reason in evaluating beliefs.
Seems to me you're just choosing to treat the issue in black-and-white terms to better serve your argument.
When given two beliefs with comparable consequences, what better method do you have to compare them? It seems to me that as long as reason is a valid form of evaluation relative to all others, it is justifiable to use it as such.
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validity and soundness are binary values. I dislike saying "black and white" in this context because that invokes a whole set of connotations that I don't think are relevant. Can you think of any argument that is neither sound nor not sound?
I do find your claim that reason is valid relative to other tools interesting. But I can find no justification for any level of validity for reason above any other tool. I challenge you to offer up a justification for the use of ( ... )
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