John Page

Yes they can , hence the argument.

I'm only partly in jest here - I don't think its a case of logic vs. god, both involve tautological assumptions.

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

John, not sure abouot your use of 'assumptions', but you say 'tautological' as if it were a bad thing.

Tautologies don't provide as much information as other logical structures, but tautologies are, at least, true.

So, what's the problem?

K

John Page

I don't think tautologies are bad, I'm making an observation that in god/religious vs. logic belief systems thay can both be viewed as closed systems. If one takes the view that one is "better" than the other (without justification of that view) we can argue until the cows come home. Of course, one can try and reconcile any two systems where they appear to be in conflict.

In my experience an appeal to logic to a committed theist has about the same effect as an appeal to faith to a committed atheist. This being the case, a relativistic stance is required since and POV is true within its own frame of reference.....

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

John, not all POVs are true, even within their own frames of reference. (Though, some systems have more internal consistency, than others.)

Just curious, why do you see atheism (or an adherence to reason) as a closed system?

It is my understanding that reason is a process, not a result. A committment to reason means that one continually questions, checks (and re-checks) one's assumptions, even one's premises.

I fail to see how that is a closed system.

Keith.

John Page

Yes they are, that's what defines the frame of reference! True doesn't necessarily mean logically true - this is the logician's frame of reference.
I don't see either as closed systems.
Reason is not necessarily logic, axiomatic logic systems are closed. Did I say reason was closed?

Cheers, John

Sun Dog

I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to do. I was attempting to show that, within your own paradigm, your statement that "there are no rules" is self-contradictory. I wasn't arguing from my own worldview-- I was arguing from yours.

Elsewhere you said:

From this, it would seem that you do indeed place some value on consistency. That being the case, I would expect you to either reject your belief that "There are no rules", or else somehow demonstrate (at least to yourself) that the contradiction is only an apparent one.

So John, let me ask you this: Do you indeed value consistency in your own beliefs? (Not anybody else's, just yours.) And if so, do you think I've managed to point out a real inconsistency in your beliefs? And if not, why not?

John Page

Chein du Soleil:

No you weren't - its your paradigm that insists a worldview has to have rules!

I value both consistency, inconsistency and other things. If I was to say I have a vorldview its in this link.

Cheers, John

Sun Dog

Actually, my paradigm makes no such assumption. I have no trouble believing that a worldview might not have any rules at all. A worldview is simply a set of beliefs, and since not all beliefs are about rules, it would be trivial to come up with a worldview that has no rules in it. Just pick a set of beliefs that don't involve rules, and there you go. Mind you, I don't know how practical such worldviews would be, or how long you'd be able to survive if you actually held such a worldview. But the mere existence of worldviews with no rules doesn't seem problematic to me.

In any event, I was indeed arguing from your paradigm and not mine. You are the one who said, "There are no rules", after all. And from what I've read, it certainly seems like you take that statement to be a rule-- and that's where the contradiction comes in. Your worldview claims there are no rules, yet it espouses a rule.

Now maybe this is really just an apparent contradiction, and not a real one. But surely you can at least admit that it looks like a contradiction when your statements are taken at face value. Now, if you have a way of resolving the contradiction (for example, by saying that "there are no rules" is not itself a rule, but is a metaphor, or a tentatively held assumption, or something else), then your worldview is not self-contradictory. And of course, if you want to just say, "Yes, my worldview is self-contradictory, and that's how I like it. What're you gonna do, cry about it?" then that's fine too.

Hey. I value inconsistency too. If a politician threatens to outlaw atheism, and then fails to follow through, then he's being inconsistent, and I wouldn't have it any other way!

However, I was referring to consistency with regard to your own worldview. I'll rephrase the question to make it clearer: Do you consistently try to make your own worldview more internally consistent by eliminating contradictions that you find within your worldview? Or do you allow contradictions to remain unresolved, or maybe even deliberately introduce contradictions into your worldview?

John Page

Good.
Then you don't understand my paradigm. You only think there are rules - they are constructs in your mind that fools itself into thinking that's why things happen or appear to be consistent/inconsistent. There is no god-like person or overarching reason that makes up or causes there to be rules. For clarity I would admit the claim or statement "There are no rules" could be modified to "There are no rules that govern our reality, our reality happens in ways that appear to us as patterns and we describe these patterns as conforming to rules. "
It is no more contradictory than the paradigm you proposed about paradigms shifting. My original point was that this appraoch can be seen to cut the ground out from under itself.
Yes, I think this is what my mind does and hence my issue with paradigm shifts - its analagous to "changes in the status quo". What I am observing is that the mind's method is not proven to be foolproof. Example: Those minds that believe the laws of physics control the universe.
I try to understand how they come to be. For example, identifying what causes us to perceive a (specific) contradiction would be a resolution. I do not subscribe to a worldview that treats them like mere puzzles or curiosities.

Cheers, john

P.S. Thanks for bearing with me, I am trying to make some serious epistemological points although I'm sure I come off as trie and annoying at times!

Sun Dog

That's certainly possible. I have been known to make mistakes on rare occasions.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, "There are no rules" should be interpreted as "There are no 'outside forces' (ie. gods, Platonic forms, principles etched in 'metaphysical stone', etc.) that control the nature of reality." Would this be correct? Would I also be correct in assuming that the statement itself is not intended to be a "principle etched in 'metaphysical stone'"? If you answer "yes" to both questions, then I think you've adequately resolved the contradiction.

<TANGENT>
In fact, I would partially agree with your statement. As a good little atheist and materialist, I don't believe in gods or platonic forms. Furthermore, I also don't view things such as physical laws as being magical principles that impose their will on dead matter from the outside. The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per second, but not because there is a Photon Traffic Cop floating in the ether and issuing tickets to reckless photons.

On the other hand, I do believe that things have intrinsic properties, and that these properties are responsible for the patterns we see in reality. Photons have a specific set of intrinsic properties, and it is these properties (and their interactions with the properties of other entities) that are responsible for the speed of light. Given that the patterns we see follow from the intrinsic properties, I don't see any reason not to call these patterns "rules". So I do believe that in this sense, rules can be said to exist. Of course, this doesn't negate the need for an open mind and a flexible epistemology-- after all, we may be mistaken about what the rules are. However, the fact that we can make mistakes about what the rules are doesn't mean that the rules themselves don't exist.
</TANGENT>

What I proposed was not a paradigm, but a procedure. It could be incorporated into a paradigm, sure, but it is not a paradigm in and of itself, because it isn't a set of beliefs about the world-- it's a set of instructions describing one way to go about comparing to paradigms.

It could potentially undermine itself, but it doesn't do so automatically in the same way that a self-contradiction does. To see why, let's consider an example of how it could undermine itself. Let's call the procedure the Paradigm Comparison Procedure, or PCP for short. (I do love drug humor. ) Suppose we were to use PCP to compare two paradigms, one which asserted "PCP is a good way to decide which of a pair of paradigms is superior", and one which asserted "PCP is a bad way to decide which paradigm is superior". Now suppose that in the course of following PCP, we discover that the latter paradigm is indeed the superior one. In this case, PCP would have undermined itself. (More accurately, a paradigm which embraced PCP as a reliable way to learn about the world would have undermined itself, but I trust the point is clear.)

So yes, PCP could undermine itself, if the hypothetical example above were to actually happen. However, since it hasn't actually happened, PCP hasn't actually been undermined. Unlike self-contradictions, which must undermine themselves, PCP only potentially undermines itself. We don't know that it actually does so.

Well, if your only point is that humans make mistakes, I certainly won't argue that!

I certainly wouldn't argue that it's important to understand why two statements are perceived as contradictory. There might well be valuable insights to be gained by doing so. However, the mere act of understanding why two statements are perceived as contradictory does not resolve the contradiction, any more than understanding the behavior of a honeybee suddenly makes the bee disappear. In fact, there really isn't any way to truly resolve a contradiction. The best you can do is show that what you thought was a contradiction really isn't-- and this option is only open to you when the "contradiction" is really not a contradiction at all, but just a misunderstanding. A real contradiction-- i.e. a statement of the form "A is true and A is false"-- will never be true no matter how well you understand it.

What I want to know is, do you try to eliminate contradictions from your worldview? If you were to discover that your worldview simultaneously implied both "A is true" and "A is false" (for whatever A you like), would you try to alter your worldview to eliminate the contradiction, or would you leave things as they were?

No problem. At least you're not threatening us with hellfire.

What I really want to know is, whatever happened to brent1? I really wanted to know what he thought of my analysis of his rule and my suggested alternative. That's the trouble with presuppositionalists-- they always disappear just when the conversation gets interesting.