Because
(a) human beings' brains are not even close to rational usually, and
(b) the world is messy, and
(c) different folks have different preferences and knowledge
then
(d) people should expect all (+/-) solutions to be erroneous up front, with
(e) the ONLY success options to real life problems over time being iterative, inductive, information-gathering, and inter-brain,
(f) and Big Up Front (BUF) Planning, especially by 1 individual, is guaranteed to fail roughly 100% of the time for complex problems
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If man is not sufficiently rational, then is the trust in chains of reasoning justifiable?
And since your claims are themselves products of chains of reasoning, so are your claims justifiable?
That depends on what you mean by justifiable. If you're stuck with the pre-Bayes notion of certainty, then of course not. If you've grokked the Bayesian revolution, then we're not playing that game any more. We're playing likelihoods, not certainties, and all likelihoods are relative. I can argue pretty effectively that from a likelihoods standpoint, my line is pretty solid when compared in predictive power to other options.
And I argue that predictive power is the only metric we have to play with on the truth axis.
Well, you have laid out a logical argument using "Because" and "then" and having premises and conclusions.
My point is that given your premise (a), how confident we can be in deriving carrying out chains of reasoning that yield your (d)-(f).
Or do you claim an exception for yourself from premise (a)?
Gyan,
I know the argument looks like that. Let me state up front that it is not intended to be a logical argument, but rather a connected sequence of statements, each one bolstering future statements.
With absolutist relativist claims (We know only that we know nothing) you can self-referentially refute them nicely.
On the other hand...you might call me an a-certaintist. I disbelieve in the existence of certainty, and contra all the philosophers from Pythagoras to Descartes, I deny the existence of certainty. My arguments have, after 20 years of weighing positions, concluded with thinking that certainty itself is the primary silly notion.
We should be making best guesses consistent with the evidence. People claiming or asking for certainty are just confused.
Aretae,
What else is a logical argument but "connected sequence of statements, each one bolstering future statements."?
Otherwise, why (and how) should each statement bolster preceding ones?.
I dont get precisely what certainty is. Do you think that there is no truth or only that men can not know it?
Or men can know the truth but they can not justify it?
Outside maths and logic, I should add.
Gyan,
Great question.
There are at least 2 levels of truth that people are usually talking about.
Questions:
1. What is the underlying nature of reality?
2. What ought I to believe, and how strongly?
Answers:
1...I don't know, I cannot know, I'm not even sure the question makes sense. Parmenides, many years before Plato, argued that the ONLY thing that can be said about the underlying reality is "it is". I agree.
2. What ought I to believe, if I am to be rational? Everything is a probability. And ALL probabilities < 1. Even math and logic are not 100% justified. They are approaching the limit, though.
Your position was known to CS Lewis in his book Miracles about 50-60 yrs ago.
It is a valid position, as far as you ignore things like evident order in the universe (Humean notion of causality was accidental at best, and causality was for him not inherent in the necessity of the things).
That point aside, one loses the justification to build chains of reasoning and thus all science. You lose even Naturalism, the theory that seeks to explain all phenomena by material causes.
Isnt arithmetic and logic the standard for justification?.
If so, then it is not meaningful to say that logic is not 100% justifiable.
Logic is the set of rules of thought.The justification presupposes logic. And thus one can not doubt logic itself. That is suspecting reason itself and thus it is a thought that stops all thought (CS Lewis).
Well I would say that the underlying reality is mind-like.
Even quantum mechanics by Bohr interpretation required conscious Observers to collapse wave functions. To me, it was a strong indicator that matter is not what appears to be in the Newtonian picture and the underlying reality is mind-like.
Now they have invented Many-worlds interpretation to get around Observers but at the cost of a fantastic picture of infinite number of universes that branch out whenever a microparticle has its wave function collapse. Take your pick which pictures appeals to you but reality is not what it was in 18th C,
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