I might as well say you just "have faith" in your axioms and leave it at that, but that would not be a good faith engagement with your framework of metaphysics and how you arrived at it.
You are also, if I'm not mistaken, using the Empiricist's Fallacy just like I pointed out. I thought you were an Objectivist, not a hardline empirical falsificationist.
Well, from an objectivist point of view, Rand discusses the axiomatic nature of the assumption that there is an objective reality which is knowable and that valid concepts should refer to them.
Going further back in metaphysics, Aristotle in “Metapphysics” book gamma the less, discusses these axioms.
But if you seriously want to reject that, which some philosophers have, then in my view this discussion must be meaningless, as it refers to nothing, and I find that rather uninteresting.
The study of natural reality and social structures and truths surely has it's place, but I don't see how it negates the metaphysical truths. Objectivism and other such philosophies look to reality through a certain scope (all sciences must have a scope and a proper object, and no science can comprehend the whole of reality at once). I am just saying that the fact that objectivism focuses on certain aspects of reality in no way negates these ones that I am talking about. It doesn't mean they should interest you in particular, just that they must not be simply discarded, for they have their place too in the bigger picture
Well Pawn. If you want to discuss those with me, please define exactly what proposition you are putting forward and describe how it would be falsified.
Otherwise, I don’t have a lot of interest in discussing people’s non-falsifiable beliefs. I just politely acknowledge those are their beliefs.
If you are interested in this sort of metaphysical issue, I do suggest Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”, but of course there are lots of other philosophical treatments. The subject does tend to be a bit involved for discussion on social media.
I'm definitely gonna read this.
I do nothing of the sort. I'm a believer in objective truth. I just don't go about expecting everyone to conceive of it exactly the way that I do before even entertaining their conversations to understand them. No one has the exact same understanding as you. A good epistemology and good discussion skills must account for this. It often seems to me that Objectivists fall pretty short of this one thing, though honestly, let's be real, basically everyone does.
My thing is that I try to understand a concept by trying out different frameworks of thought, perhaps one my interlocutor is using, perhaps one they haven't even thought of yet, so that I understand the actual meaning of the concept, before I reject it or make assertions about it that are likely to be irrelevant or unproductive.
One item I notice in your statements of positions is that you tend to assert what the other person is thinking or assuming. It does strike me that this could interfere with actually understanding the other person’s position accurately.
You are correct that I simply don’t have time to try and understand other people’s non-falsifiable beliefs. If they have them, I just leave that alone generally speaking. I have enough scientific problems I want to try and understand and struggle with and life is finite, especially as we get older.
I do understand that some people, especially those with non-falsifiable beliefs, can be offended by this apparent shortness, so I try and be polite about it.
Still waiting for some falsiability experiment that could disprove the premiss "only falsifiable concepts can be true", or some empirical evidence for the affirmation "only empirical evidence can be true". Choosing non falsifiable and non empirical axioms to later disprove non falsifiable and non empirical concepts seems problematic to say the least. But ok.
Pawn I don’t think there is one. That is axiomatic, as described by Aristotle. Try making any argument, even those here, without assuming that existence exists and that valid concepts refer to reality. It falls apart very quickly.
This is really is a very old philosophical problem on which much ink has been used. So I certainly can’t find a way logically outside that to explain here and would just suggest reading Aristotle on that.
But perhaps Kevin’s Bacon will have more to discuss about it.
There is one other aspect of this I think is interesting to consider as a neuroscientist. From my perspective all our thoughts and concepts correspond to some activity of neurons in our brain. And our brain is an evolved organ which evolved to help us predict the environment and act in ways that propagated our genes.
So in this sense logic and axioms are fundamental arrangements of activity that help us achieve that goal.
Something to ponder.
Yeah I love this insight, I used it to formulate a sort of basis for my own codified epistemology that's roughly based on a realist interpretation of Kant (screw idealism or the assumption that the real world is unknowable and dismissable). Piaget also has something that sort of answers this as saying that every truth is a tool in a framework within which it applies. But I haven't read much about it yet, just discovered him.
Realism rules. Aquinas is the GOAT
You don't happen to know portuguese, do you? The best book I've ever read on the topic of gnosiology and epistemology is "Gnosiologia Pluridimensional", by the latvian Father Stanislavs Ladusãns, but it was written in portuguese and has no translations that I know of. This book is a gem. If you can, try to find it and ask for help translating it. It would be a great service to the philosophy world
Honestly that's totally fine. My original post was a discussion essentially about Objectivists' argumentation regarding God and their assertions relating that to their metaphysics, so that was of course the focus of my further debate into it. I thought it very relevant to the discussion as this was my original intent and interest in critiquing.
The idea itself is something I have spent quite a bit of time pondering over, and what I found lacking from any Objectivist sources or debaters was a serious discussion of the topic that gave any further insight at all, or that even considered the stronger arguments that could be posed by theists or agnostics, of which I have about 30 years of experience being and thinking from those frameworks.
