Thread: Truth and Logic
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Old 03-November-2009, 11:44 PM
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Ken G Ken G is offline
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Originally Posted by uncommonsense View Post
So, I accept the limitations of my senses, in that, I will never know using my senses, if you exist when you are out of the room - and I develope a synthetic a priori. I imagine you outside of the room. This makes perfect sense according to my real a prioris, and so I adopt a synthetic a priori regarding your existence using LOGIC, not sensual ultimate truth. More?
There are subtle but important distinctions between formal logic and the way the word logic gets used in informal ways. Some people use "logic" to mean anything that seems reasonable. So if they know the Earth is spinning, and they know it would be hard to stop the Earth, or they know that the Sun has come up every morning for thousands of years of recorded history, they say it is "logical" that the Sun will come up tomorrow. But that's not quite what logic is, logic only played a small but clearly identifiable part in that process. Logic did not say the Earth is spinning, logic did not say it's hard to stop the Earth, and logic did not say that there is nothing around that is capable of stopping the Earth. Also, logic did not say that something that has happened every day for a long time should happen tomorrow. Those are all things that we say, those are all part of actual truth as judged and tested by us, not by logic. Those are patterns we have observed, part of our experience. Purely experiential truth, none of them are themselves examples of logic (though logic played a role in our assembling these experiential truths, just as grammar played a role in what I just wrote even though grammar has nothing to do with what I just wrote).
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