When you speak of rationality, there are two very distinct components. One is logical reasoning, which is about going from premises to conclusions, conclusions that should be as good as your premises. Thus, logic will get you into insanity if you’ve got the wrong premises.
The other component of rationality is having the right premises. How do you get them and how do you determine that they are right? Not by logical reasoning, surely, because then you would be reasoning from other premises in order to justify them. There is an instinct, or revelation, or whatever you want to call it, that underlies your thinking, and the only interesting problem in philosophy is how you get that.
2 comments:
Hardly a particularly profound quote - in fact trivially obvious:
Premises + Logic = Conclusion
If either of the former two are incorrect, then the latter is unfounded (though not necessarily false).
If this is what passes for profundity in ID, then I would suggest that the entire movement needs a course in remedial philosophy.
A major chunk of the field of science (generally referred to as basic research) is exclusively devoted to figuring out which premises are the right ones. Instinct and revelation have nothing to do with it.
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