I am quite unsure what distinction you are attempting here to draw between method and system. Furthermore, the fact that foundationalism can be turned on itself, and I would argue fails to pass its own standards, is quite irrelevent to your question of what pancritical rationalism has to say about metaphysics and ethics.
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Thread: Philosophical personality test
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04-28-2007, 02:09 PM #21
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04-28-2007, 02:13 PM #22
Faith is necessary in order to accept the proposition that we think is 90% likely to be true as the truth that we can work with. It is much less complicated that it sounds. Apriorism is very difficult to refute, as Kant made a very strong case for its necessity. If you do that, you're back to many of the problems that Hume has faced. I do believe at this point that in virtue of Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism (apriori and aposteriori) systematic knowledge is rendered possible. Otherwise Hume was right since we cant fall back on induction or causality, we just know that things happen and have no idea how they happen. Yet noone really believes this, they think that induction and causality have value of some kind, yet little did they know that this can only be justified in acceptance of Kant's apriori. Otherwise we have no reason to believe that what is in imagination can in any way be connected to what we perceive through the senses. Yet what we have arrived at with the great Kant, is mitigated rationalism: we can have an apriori picture of the truth (like Galileo said that Mathematics is the language that God wrote the universe with), or even an apriori map of how the universe works (like mathematics is one of), and to figure things out we need to discover where exactly we are on the map. Knowledge comes from correlations between our aposteriori discoveries with the course we've charted apriori. (Nonetheless... even a simple scientific hypothesis is good enough evidence of apriori as it has not been tested at the moment it was born in your mind). Accordingly, ideas that have been confirmed aposteriori are epistemically superior to those that were not. It is only in virtue of our apriori ideas was aposteriori thinking born, because at one point somebody came up with this idea of how empirical evidence is the most reliable guide to truth and at first this was nothing more than an idea in one's mind. We have plenty of reasons to believe that certain 'apriori systems' symbolize the way the world works and they are immanent within nature, not within our mind, but are there for our minds to discover, just like mathematics for instance.
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04-28-2007, 02:15 PM #23
Foundationalism, realism, skepticism... etc... all of these that were listed here tell us more about the thinker's philosophical attitudes and not specific philosophical beliefs... they are definitely more akin to a method than to an already charted out system. Yet clearly they all could be used to build a system yet they are not very indicative of what kind of a system could be built with them. In this respect a foundationalist, who is very different from a realist could end up having a very similar system to his counterpart despite the profound methodological differences.
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04-28-2007, 02:40 PM #24
I didn't say that I found it complicated. I said that I need not have faith in any position, neither do I desire to have faith in any position, since my subjective feeling of faith has no bearing on whether that position is true. Neither do I believe any of my postions are 90% likely, nor 30%, 45% or 99% likely. In fact, I am entirely stumped, how you propose such a measurement should be carried out?
Apriorism is very difficult to refute...
Yet noone really believes this, they think that induction and causality have value of some kind, yet little did they know that this can only be justified in acceptance of Kant's apriori. Otherwise we have no reason to believe that what is in imagination can in any way be connected to what we perceive through the senses.
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04-28-2007, 02:45 PM #25
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04-28-2007, 02:56 PM #26
Hang on a second. Here is apriori in a nutshell. I first make a hypothesis for my scientific experiment, and there is my apriori. It doesnt move on to aposteriori untill I've tested it out with empirical evidence. Everybody believes in apriori, just not everybody acknowledges that, without it would not be possible for us to say that we have valid thoughts. Kant's solution to Hume's problem was much simpler than it appeared to be, as close to simplistic as you can get. He basically told Hume that he must have believed in apriori all along otherwise he would not have completed his attack upon metaphysics as he then would not have been able to acknowledge that he is having meaningful thoughts.
Really!? Than we should throw your Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to the flames to--for it does not contain a number and or any experimental reasoning.
I agree with your figure about probability, we just have to say that whatever we perceive to be most likely to be true we should tentatively accept as the truth, but not just stop right there. So if proposition A we deemed to be 5% likely to be true, B --10% and C 11%... we will have to accept C as the truth for now, but this will be far from exhaustive as we know that we have a long way to go to absolute knowledge, which I believe to be unattainable, doubt we will ever have a 100% there. Even if we are at 95... we shouldnt stop there, we will just have to keep digging.Last edited by SolitaryWalker; 04-28-2007 at 07:05 PM.
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04-28-2007, 02:57 PM #27
That is closer to what I originally thought you meant, though contrasting the words method with system is highly misleading, since the two are listed as synonyms in the dictionary. That still doesn't settle my confusion regarding why you decided to bring it up at all, since I am quite aware pancritical rationalism, in its most stripped-down and basic form, has very little content. That is intentional, since the pancritical rationalist is one who may entertain any position. For example, the pancritical rationalist should not grant apriori superiority to naturalistic theories over supernaturalistic theories when explaining phenomena.
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04-28-2007, 03:11 PM #28
I was referring to Kant's assertion that particular truths about the universe were granted to us apriori, for free. These truths were those such as Euclidean geometry or Newtonian mechanics, these synthetic truths allowed us to transend idealism and interact with the thing in itself, not as passive information dispensers as Hume envisaged, but as active participants who bring our own ingredients to the recipe. This argument does nothing to defeat the old sceptic arguments, since there is still no justification or reason to believe any analytic position, nor any position that we have been granted these apriori synthetic truths.
Really!? Than we should throw your Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding to the flames to--for it does not contain a number and or any experimental reasoning.
I agree with your figure about probability, we just have to say that whatever we perceive to be most likely to be true we should tentatively accept as the truth, but not just stop right there. So if proposition A we deemed to be 5% likely to be true, B --10% and C 11%... we will have to accept C as the truth for now, but this will be far from exhaustive as we know that we have a long way to go to absolute knowledge, which I believe to be unattainable, doubt we will ever have a 100% there. Even if we are at 95... we shouldnt stop there, we will just have to keep digging.
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04-28-2007, 03:17 PM #29
You're right that induction could be accepted only on faith, dogmatically, but this is what we need to do just to move on. As we can not justify this phenomena through an adequate correlation between apriori and aposteriori. Yet again Kant certainly has offered a suggestion about how we can build a philosophical system despite the lack of aposteriori certainty. I think we can reasonably accept his tenet of apriori concerning that 2 plus2=4 can be deemed true with apodictic certainty only apriori, yet in the real world this is not possible to justify(Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica is the case in point), once again reinforces the viability of Hume's discovery
You're right about that so we should just say that we are going to work with whatever seems most likely to be true at the time, as we do not have the absolute figure to relate it to.
I dont think that there is any apriori knowledge, I know that Schopenhauer didn't believe in him, doubt that Kant did as Schopenhauer implemented his methodology. Innate truths are left behind with Plato, transcendental idealism is widely misunderstood and this is one of those ways in which it is. It posits that the noumenal reality is entirely inacessibe and neither Kant nor Schopenhauer thought that they could have any knowledge of it and at best we can have the phenomenal. The phenomenal reality is subjectively conditioned, yet our knowledge of it can only be acquired through experiences. Even to chart an apriori map of the phenomenal world we need some kind of an experience as mathematics may be a symbolic outline of how the world works, yet nobody has innate knowledge of mathematics much to Plato's remonstrates.
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04-28-2007, 03:36 PM #30
How about we hold preference for those positions which have most successfully withstood criticism? There is no pretense that such positions are more probable, likely, founded or supported, they have simply survived critical examination where alternatives have failed, survival of the fittest, so to speak.
I dont think that there is any apriori knowledge, I know that Schopenhauer didn't believe in him, doubt that Kant did as Schopenhauer implemented his methodology. Innate truths are left behind with Plato, transcendental idealism is widely misunderstood and this is one of those ways in which it is. It posits that the noumenal reality is entirely inacessibe and neither Kant nor Schopenhauer thought that they could have any knowledge of it and at best we can have the phenomenal. The phenomenal reality is subjectively conditioned, yet our knowledge of it can only be acquired through experiences. Even to chart an apriori map of the phenomenal world we need some kind of an experience as mathematics may be a symbolic outline of how the world works, yet nobody has innate knowledge of mathematics much to Plato's remonstrates.
I think Kant would have been more successful had he lived in the time of Darwin, who identified how it was that we could have apriori synthetic knowledge. In fact, Darwin's answer can be interpreted as follows, the development of knowledge did not begin when you were born, but began billions of years ago when the very first ancestors of us all began to take shape.
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