What are the limits to rationality?

[struggle4progress]

Everyone, of course, thinks of himself or herself as a reasonable person, whose views are supported by rational thought.

Since there seem to be a diverse number of mutually inconsistent views, this raises the question whether different people mean the same thing by "logic" and what the status of any common core might be.

If one reasons according to reasoning rules, then some assumptions must be made to get the process going. What good is diligent reasoning from false assumptions? And, in fact, some rules might be more questionable than others

[lvx35]

1. power blossoms from truth.

and logical rules are as valid as the amount of power they give you.

A good example is mathematical reasoning. Its validity comes from the fact we can figure so much out about the real world with it...It gives us power because it explains things, makes them rational so we can work with them. Other things work for reasons we don't quite understand, but the fact that they work is all we really need to know, we consider them true because they work.

[beam me up scottie]

2. Oh, great.

Another thread about intelligent design. :evilgrin:

[hunter]

7. Very insightful.

When you look at the development of "logic" the foundations were built by people seeking to figure out the rules of "Creation." It culminates in the Grand Heresy of Newton and Leibniz, that God is in the infinitesimals -- that you can find the solution to an equation with a variable that approaches zero as a limit. The unspeakable horror to religious people is that this variable might be G-d Himself, and thus the Creator neatly steps outside His own Creation.

Personally I don't think logic is the glittering creation everyone thinks it is. There are tools that are useful for parsing and predicting the future, and describing the past, and tools that are less useful. We make things like computers that are very rigidly based upon our logic and engineering skills, but they in no way reflect the operation of our minds. The vast majority of the things we do every day are illogical. Our reasons for doing things are usually a fuzzy haze of wants and needs and intuitions -- there is no equation that describes this. Logic is just another tool in a larger toolkit, one that most people rarely use in their daily business.

[beam me up scottie]

8. I don't think logic is a glittering creation at all.

I think it's one of many weapons that make up a potentially deadly arsenal against superstition and fear.

Why else would so many fundamentalists attempt to demote a method of reasoning to a religious belief?

[hunter]

9. Why? They want the world to be as fuzzy to you as it is to them.

When you have a clearer view of the world than they do, it scares them...

I get ferociously upset when teachers are prevented from teaching, either by forcing them to "teach to the test" when the test is clearly lame, or by forcing them to teach to a text that has been crippled for political reasons.

Biology, Health and History textbooks in particular are astonishingly crappy because publishers and selection committees are afraid of people who are less rational than the average farm animal.

You know what? We live in a nation that does some pretty crappy things, we are not number one "under God." The creation and flood stories of Genesis cannot be literally true, even if a person actually could interpret them. Most everyone is going to experience sex. But we can't say those things, we have to gag ourselves?

[saltpoint]

3. If it feels good, do it. No, wait -- scratch that. How about Don't

eat meat because animals have faces. No, that's not it either.

Let's go with Haste makes waste. No sense waiting til the last minute. Time's the healer. Time's the best teacher. Time's the best teacher but it kills all its students. Results may vary.

One man's ceiling is another man's floor. She's a one-man woman livin' in a two-time town. Thank God for butterscotch pie. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

She comes and goes like the weather. He's crazy like a fox. Jesus loves me this I know. If you ain't a cowboy, you ain't shit. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool Lola. He's nuttier than a fruitcake. The voices told me to set fire to the pizza joint.

The world is safer without Saddam. We want to bring the terrorists to justice. We'll get bin Laden dead or alive. Bring it on. Smoke 'em out. Shock and awe. Mission accomplished. My Medicaid prescription forms are indecipherable. I'm from New England but I'm really a cowboy. John Kerry speaks French. Give a big hand to Macaca over there. You have to be this tall to ride this ride. Under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

[Random_Australian]

4. Other: The structure of logic itself yields the ability to find the

highest statistical co-efficient of accuracy, however this requires real-value inputs from empirical investigation, and the only way we ever find the structure to it all is also empirical investigation.

In other words, only one thing beats logic in terms of finding the solution with the highest chance of bieng an accurate world-view.

Why just the chance of bieng accurate? It is simple logic to show that we don't ever know 100% if we are right.

[Finder]

5. Oh boy, is the word logic up for redefining now?....

Humanity will never get on the same page as long as we are all using different books.

[struggle4progress]

6. There are, in fact, a number of different "logics" which have been ..

.. precisely defined. The relation between them is not always unclear.

One could ask, for example, whether "double-negation" makes sense: if the assertion "the assertion X is false" is false, is X necessarily a true assertion? Some people reject such rules. To make philosophical sense of "double-negation," one needs to make sense of the idea that an assertion can be false. But perhaps on a dedicated materialist view of the world, only statements that reflect actual conditions are sensible statements, and other statements are simply meaningless noise ...

[TallahasseeGrannie]

10. Logic and rationality

are important tools for getting through life. I personally belief that their cousins, intuition and emotional intelligence are equally important.

[Hoping4Change]

11. I think it would be better to ask whether rationality is applicable in all

human endeavors. I personally think that rationality helps in any situation to illuminate issues but its not enough. All situations require a mix of intuition and rationality.

[cyborg_jim]

12. Intution is rational

Intuition is merely the process of making a decision when faced with incomplete information. Many logics can only provide a rational answer when the knoweldge domain is fully known or knowable. Sometimes this is not possible.

The use of 'intuition' is therefore the rational thing to do when it is not possible to do anything else.