Principals Of Reason

[Kriminal99]

Occam's Razor, Ideas extracted from studying Coherentism in epistemology etc. :

 

One should fail to differentiate between different belief sets or labeling schemes which use the same set of observations. It isn't possible to limit what you are working with to just the observations themselves because you need a way to reference those observations as well, but if you fail to differentiate between them you will be assured to use the least amount of effort in processing the observations. You will also be able to jump back and forth between labeling schemes and belief sets that contain the same observations, thus allowing you to put any argument in terms of a person's own set of beliefs and/or labeling scheme.

 

Anyone who understands this and what they are talking about would eventually be able to put any of their arguments in terms that you can understand. Though if the argument is exceedingly complicated, there may be many steps involved. Arguments that cannot be falsified are a direct violation of this principal and should simply be ignored (rather than argued against).

 

Limits of Induction, Global skepticism, Fundamental assumptions of probability theory:

 

There is absolutely no reason why anything which is usually true should continue to be so. It just usually turns out that way. Therefore, any indication that a situation might be different this time, and that previous assumptions might fail, must be investigated. A couple of examples of how to apply this reasoning: Any law or truth that appears to be universal does not apply to things where we cannot observe the properties that served as the premises in deducing that universal law (c may not apply to the realm of particles too small to observe). An intelligent being who disagrees with you on a certain subject has some reasoning or experience driving their disagreement. If you don't understand what that is, or it might be something different than what you think, then you have no reason to believe that you are right and they are wrong.

[Rade]

Did not Bertrand Russell argue correctly a problem with Coherentism ? As a theory of truth, coherentism restricts true sentences to those that cohere with some specified set of sentences. So suppose this set of sentences that cohere { x1, x2, x3...xn}, one would say they are true sentences given that they cohere for someone and lead to a justified belief. So, let x1 = 1+1=2, x2 = 2/2=0, and so on, all true statements. However, there is also equally possible a negation set of the same sentences that cohere, (let~=negation), {~x1,~x2,~x3..~xn}. So, ~x1 = 1+1 does not=2, ~x2 = 2/2 does not=0 and so on. Houston, we have a problem. Coherentism must allow that both sets are equally true as a justified belief, that 1+1=2 is equally as true as 1+1 does not =2. Given the logical contradiction of the claim concerning a valid justified belief, Coherentism cannot hold as a logical epistemology.

 

Then we have this from the philosopher Alvin Plantinga from interent:

 

There are many objections against coherentism. The most pressing objection has to do with whether the coherentist can tell any story about how a system of justfied beliefs gets input from the world. We don't want just any old consistent story with enough interlocking detail to count as justified. Alvin Plantinga tells a story of a mountain climber who's sitting on a ledge, and then all his beliefs "freeze." He keeps having new experiences, but none of his beliefs change. His friends come get him off the ledge, and take him home, but he continues to have all the same beliefs. He might now be having visual experiences of his bedroom, but he still believes he's sitting on the mountain ledge, the wind is blowing his hair, the sun is just starting to set, and so on. (We can even suppose he believes he's having experiences of the mountain ledge, the wind, the sun, and so on. But he's not. He's having experiences of his bedroom right now.) Clearly there's something wrong with this climber. We wouldn't want to count his screwy system of beliefs as justified. (Maybe it was justified once, but it's not justified anymore.)

 

There are principles of good reasoning, Coherentism is not one of them.

Edited April 5, 2013 by Rade