Rationality is a complex construction. Rationality includes logical inference and avoiding inconsistency, but it also involves judgements where the rational agent is trying to uncover truths or at least be sufficiently right to maximise chances of survival. It is tempting to say that rational agent will always try to follow a strategy to achieve some objectives. That may be true, but rationality requires more by requiring the rational agent to assess evidence in support of or against a judgement in a way that is verifiable by another rational agent. I think that the requirement of evidence assessment is normative; otherwise the rational agent could end up supporting a judgement that is not supported by evidence at all. But judgement is often a matter of subjective likelihood, and theories emerge when accounting for the evidence which do not meet the currently accepted norms for acceptance. Examples of this include in science include Galileo's theory of cosmology and Mendel's theory of genetics. Thus rationality is amenable to the imposition of norms, but the norms themselves need to be adaptable to revision in the light of new evidence and new theories which account for that evidence.

In economics, there are very specific requirements for rationality.

It can be directly naturalised if you go by the theories that permit that. Otherwise is does become a debate, as you see to suggest here. But to follow Kawolik here, what actually motivates your question?

Oh, and yes, defining agentism is necessary here to understand whether or not you really need a debate on this (on naturalising rationality).

It would be worthwhile to explore different notions of rationality and normativity before straightforwardly answering this question, but to be brief:

I believe there are normative as well as non-normative notions of rationality. I agree with Michael Kowalik's comment above, that there are logical (minimal) criteria for rationality, and I believe these are non-normative insofar as they are methodologically required in semantics. However, there are also normative notions, such as "if you were rational, you would stop squandering resources" (etc.), which are based on social norms. I have explored this dichotomy a bit in a paper available here on RG:Article Radical Rationalization Accommodates Rampant Irrationality

Logical principles are the genealogy of rationality and normativity. The lack of a universal, infallible structure implies that rationality can be naturalized. In fact, for a reductive naturalist, rationality and normativity are the evolutionary product.

Michael Kowalik

I think that, in a conversation like this, it is important to establish a specific definition of "rationality" that everyone involved in the discussion can agree upon. The usual definition of "rationality" is a reliance on logical reasoning to make decisions that are free of emotional and intuitional biases, which would undoubtedly be a normative concept. I would reject this definition of rationality, however, as I believe emotionality and intuition to be just as fundamental of a human endeavor as reason, and I believe that reason separated from emotional and intuitional judgements can be just as biased as these supposedly inferior methods of judgement (for instance, even what is considered to be logical reasoning seems to differ across cultures, and so it still contains some of the subjective characteristics seen in emotionality and intuition.) Therefore, I would argue for a definition of rationality that involves using the whole of human perception and thinking (i.e., in which reason, intuition, emotion, spirituality, etc. all combine into one) to make judgements. This definition would still be normative in that it prescribes a certain way of approaching decision-making, but it also most fundamentally asserts that we can best be rational by acting according to our human instincts, thus making it normative through description (Abraham Maslow wrote frequently on how to make implicit normative judgements through merely descriptive observations of human nature.)

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198754282.001.0001

Michael Kowalik

Your argument that to promote my definition of rationality as the paramount norm is fair, although the reason why I promote this definition is simply because I believe it is the one that can lead to the most consensus. If we use all psychological faculties when making judgements, I believe that this allows us to keep a more open mind to viewpoints that are alternative to our own, as it grants us the ability to engage in various forms of thinking rather than just one. Thus, I promote my own definition not out of a confidence in this definition having all of the answers, but because I feel that it can help us really to be less prone to this mistake of feeling that we have all of the answers and more able to acknowledge how we can benefit from other ideas.

As to your discussion of adhering to the "fundamental laws of logic", I don't truly believe that there are any fundamental laws of logic agreed upon by all people in the world, and so I believe this idea to be just as prone to fallacy as any other. For instance, consistency and avoidance of contradiction seems to be a fundamental logical principle in many Western cultures, but it seems to be less important in some Eastern cultures.

Of course, in promoting such a pluralistic philosophy which advises being aware of the faults inherent in one's own position, I cannot say that my ideas are by any means the best ones. They are just as open to criticism as any other. But I think that it is always worth pushing forward an idea that opposes those of the vast majority if not for any reason other than to get people thinking. I think that as soon as we attempt to settle on one answer alone to any particular question, we have ceased to understand the question in its full complexity. Perhaps what is truly the most "rational" thing to do is to never stop considering different possible answers to the same question.

Michael Kowalik

Frederik van Gelder Thanks for the kind words!

The scepticism you represent on this list expresses itself in the following 'moves', and they're extremely effective in shutting down discourse: "define your terms" is the first one, "go read up on xxxxx" the second one. (Some link to something you've found somewhere.) I've seen you do it on poor Callaway's feed. It's not your call to make: "Unless we can agree (or recognise that we already agree) on the minimal normative foundations of sense vs. non-sense there is no possibility of constructive argumentation." The criterion for constructive argumentation can only be made retrospectively - from the history of ideas perspective. It doesn't depend in the least on what you personally think it is. All this was defended at some length by Feyerabend forty years ago...

Manas kumar Sahu : you're the one who formulated this question. Perhaps you'd like to further elaborate just where you wanted to take this. You seem to have this notion that Kant, AI and the history/discourse of religion have something to do with each other. I'm sceptical - no less than Kowalik - on this. (Though mine isn't a principled scepticism.)

You seem to be an engineer, a specialist on high speed tunnel vehicles. I claim no competence in that area whatsoever. But I can find no peer-reviewed philosophy articles or books with your name on it - philosophy being my area. I am not an undergraduate. According to your masthead you have scholarly publications to your name on Kant, Habermas, Ricoeur and Hegel. Could you cite these please? All I can find are those high speed vehicles ...

I have an alternate question: Is it possible to answer this question - let alone determine the rational status of any given response to it - without deference to (prescribed and/or presupposed) norms?

Alternatively, how do we determine the normative status of normativity without presupposing the very thing (the rationality of reason) in question?

My response (in thesis uploaded here) is that every conception of rationality presupposes a criteria of relevance or adequacy regarding the rational status of 'rationality'.

Given the problem of the criterion, however, we invariably find ourselves moving within a circle: how do we determine the relevance or adequacy of the criteria itself - i.e. determine what is relevant or adequate to the question of 'rationality' in the first place.

This strikes me as the real question (or problem). Witness Quine's attempt to naturalize epistemology (or truth conditions and values). If his proposal were true and/or possible, we wouldn't even be able to determine its truth value without recourse to the very norms (conditions of possibility) he wishes to eliminate.

Thanks for the response Michael.

As I argue (p.168 of my thesis), however, the law of non-contradiction is itself (performatively) contradictory...and that Aristotle cannot provide a rational grounding for 'the most certain of all principles' (given his own conception of rationality).

I'd also encourage you to read about dialetheism if you haven't already - Graham Priest challenges Aristotle's conception of rationality

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/

As to question of whether the laws of reason are found or made, the answer appears to be both (or not 'either/or' according to the law of non-contradiction): (See Kant and Goodman for delineations).

Rationality, normativity, nature. (RNN)

Philosophy has a 'logic' to it that differs from science and technology. Those socialised in the latter - this forum after all has 'Research' on its letterhead - are used to taking their point of departure from definitions, from irrefutable truths (like the tertium non datur that came by), or from some empiricist position on the necessity of experience, the rules of logic, and experimental verification. As the world hopes for the virologists to get on with it and produce a vaccine, we're all reminded that life itself, all the way to this species that we belong to, has its 'material presuppositions'. To put it a bit bluntly, without science and technology production would break down, and millions would be left without the necessities of life. So these 'positions' described are not trivial, and the irritation that sometimes arises when philosophers (or those claiming to be that) come along and 'question everything' is understandable. We live in an irritable and disconsolate world, increasingly becoming hungry and jobless. Then again, there's something specific about RG that is both immensely attractive and at the same time probably makes consensus on anything outside of narrowly defined research projects just about impossible. RG is turning into a global forum, with very many contributors from all over the world, from very diverse backgrounds. English has become, de facto, the world's 'lingua franca', but for an Anglophile like yours truly even in Europe the level of competence leaves much to be desired. (Just in case this sounds arrogant let me hasten to say that English is my third language. My impression is, that is not at all unusual on this forum: English as a third, a fourth language.) But it's one more source of confusion, one more reason why even simple agreement on anything, outside of the strictly technical, is so difficult to achieve.

There's no real mystery about why discussions about RNN are becoming highly controversial: the world is in crisis, and while science and technology keep the economy going, it's also become obvious that the normative foundations - the 'rules' - on the basis of which the 'distribution' of what this globalized economy produces takes place, that these rules no longer have any rational basis. There's also the little matter of what this globalized economy is doing to the environment, the 'nature' in that RNN. In the terminology of philosophy: rationality, normativity, nature are 'objectively' contradictory, they make demands on our ability to understand them - these abstractions - that can't be met by 'traditional' logic, by which is meant: by the type of logic and the types of reasoning that are perfectly acceptable - perhaps even obligatory - for scientists and engineers.

Now this line of argumentation of mine is not new, and anyone who wants to be serious about what I'm saying here is forced to go back to Kant and Hegel, because that's where these things have been laid out, explored, shown to be irrefutable, at a level vastly more persuasive than I could possibly hope to pull off here.

Which brings me to the point of all this: philosophy is always about interpretation, it always has this temporal dimension to it: "someone says 'a' about 'b'". Hume says this about universals, Kant reacts to that, Russell says this about it several centuries later. The work I'm involved in myself - so-called 'critical theory' - is really the translation of some crucial texts on all of this for a wider reading (and scholarly) public. These issues can't be settled via this format, on RG, which is very difficult to escape: 'here's my opinion, what's yours?' It all depends on who is giving those opinions, with what background, with what weight of tradition and scholarship behind it. Today's individualism is not a good basis for a serious debate about philosophy. Rationality, normativity, nature - they can't be handled through 'traditional' logic. That's not my claim, that's Kant - and everyone who came after him ...

Frederik,

your saying that „that these rules no longer have any rational basis“, and that some people are „taking their point of departure from definitions, from irrefutable truths (like the tertium non datur that came by)“, is not in tension with the claim that the tertium non datur may be a minimal requirement of rationality. There is nothing surprising about people in crisis, or just people in technological sciences, taking a departure from what philosophers think is rational. What they cannot take a departure from, however, is their own internal consistency, on pains of being deemed irrational by this minimal criterion.

Modern philosophical notions of rationality of course do allow that people act thoroughly irrational; it only means that these people are hard to ascribe intentions, beliefs and the like to, as these ascriptions methodologically require a great degree of consistency (still, I doubt that even the most irrational seeming people are vastly irrational in practice - it more likely just means that our interpretation of their intentions, beliefs etc. leaves something to be desired. Trump may contradict himself verbally all the time, but his intentions in doing so are not especially hard to interpret, and his reasons for doing so not especially hard to assign; similarly, if you intend to throw out conventional measures of rationality to achieve some social or technological aim, you are, only superficially paradoxically, thereby conventionally rational).

Before setting the normative condition of rationality, One need to address the problem of normativity itself. The normativity depends upon meta normative principles. Only foundationalism can tackle the problem of normative principle on leading to the circularity of reason and skepticism.

The objective of framing the question was to give equal opportunity to both naturalist and non-naturalist to address the criterion problem of normativity and rationality in order to give objective criteria (acceptable irrespective of naturalism and nonnaturalism) of rationality.

The introduction - in a discussion of the difference between rationality, normativity and nature (RNN) - of the 'tertium non datur', stands for something else, namely the philosophy of Logical Atomism or Logical Positivism, as these were represented with such enormous and lasting authority by Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein at the beginning of the 20th Century. These are philosophies - which to this day have a world-wide following among natural scientists, physicists and engineers - that are based on the dualism coming from Descartes, according to which subjectivity and objectivity are 'categorically' different, i.e. they're based on the premiss that there's no way of 'mediating' between the two. (Leading then to Mind/Brain-dichotomy type discussions like the well-known one between Popper and Eccles of 1977.) (Why decisions on difficult moral/legal conflicts of the kind that judges deal with every day should be many any easier by presenting such a judge with a picture of his/her brain-scan while engaged in such deliberations no enthusiast of contemporary neurophysiology has been able to make plausible.)

Is the tertium non datur a *law of thought* in the sense of rationalism - formal logic lays down the 'bounds of sense', beyond which nothing intelligible can be said - or is it a description of *reality* in the sense of empiricism? Greek cosmology did not distinguish between 'thesis' and 'physis' - thought and reality are 'one', as they are to this day for many pre-modern cultures, and for many members even of modern societies. (It's a constant in the entire Psychology literature that narcissism is the condition in which a subject is not capable of understanding the meaning of the word 'projection', i.e. the ability, in one's own perceptions and convictions, to tease out the bits that are objective - independent of our own biography and convictions - and that aspect that is as it were 'home-grown', coming from within the 'ego' itself.)

It's this teasing apart of rationalism and empiricism in the old and venerable legacy coming from Plato and Aristotle that starts with Kant, and has continued ever since. Universals and particulars are not - as many coming from the analytic philosophy tradition to this day believe - the same, they're not 'one', though they're not entirely 'separate' either. Welcome to modern epistemology and philosophy of science, and the debate about the difference between words and things.

Joachim Lipski - Sie drehen die Sache um. Sie stellen meine Aussage dar, als ob es hier um eine philosophische Doktrin von Rationalität ginge, die sozusagen der Welt 'aufgedrückt' wird - wogegen es natürlich ausreicht zu demonstrieren, dass es Leute gibt, die ganz und gar nicht rational denken oder handeln. (Inklusiv Fälle, wo die Irrationalität selber Schein ist, d.h. sehr wohl die tieferen Motivationen nicht so schwer auszumachen sind - etwa die von Ihnen erwähnte Parteiwerbung à la Trump. Darüber ist schon genug gesagt worden in den *Studies in Prejudice* von vor 80 Jahren.) Während es mich ein wenig verwundert, dass einer, dem die Nachkriegsintellektuellenauseinandersetzungen doch einigermaßen vertraut sein müssten, eine Basisaussage aus der Politischen Ökonomie nicht versteht oder vorgibt, sie nicht zu verstehen: Produktion hier, Distribution dort. Dass es weltweit immer weniger Konsens darüber gibt, dass die Regeln der Güterdistribution gerecht sind. Ich verstehe, dass Sie aus der Neurophysiologie kommen, aber, aus Ihrem Bereich kommend, wie würde dann ein prinzipieller Einwand formuliert werden, etwa gegen ein Buch wie *Legitimationskrise* von Habermas?

Manas kumar Sahu - Thank you for clarifying some of the context of your original question. Are there objective criteria for the "problem" of normativity, and can these be formulated in a way that they withstand sceptical arguments from both the naturalism and anti-naturalism camp?

One gathers also, from your question, that you feel that RG provides the kind of platform on which it is possible to pursue a question which many (including yours truly) thinks that it is important. I also, personally, share this, and most especially on a forum for researchers and scholars. I'm less certain that this "what's your opinion/here's my opinion" type of exchange can go anywhere, but who knows. One needs some way, already at the level of rules, to be able to appeal to fair 'rules of engagement'. This is not social media, there must be a way of stopping straightforward polemicizing, based on nothing more than today's omnipresent sense of entitlement. Any ideas on such rules?

Frederik van Gelder I believe that for rules such as these, one can turn to an article written by Dr. Russell Walsh from Duquesne University (which can be found through this link: Article On Evidence and Argument in Phenomenological Research

Dr. Walsh focuses primarily on how these principles relate to phenomenological research in psychology, but they can be applied really to any debate of an academic nature (with the occasional exclusion of natural science research, which, as you have mentioned, requires much more specific methods of study.) To summarize his argument, Walsh claims that the most beneficial approach to debates of an academic nature involves a break away from the recent trends of attempting to have one party in the debate "win" over the other party, on the grounds that their argument is "more logically valid", and to turn more towards an attitude of perspective-taking, in which each party makes an equal and reciprocal attempt to understand the others' perspective(s), and then come to form a synthesis of all of these perspectives to which all involved in the debate can agree. This (genuine) consensus of perspectives is what I believe to be meant by the term "intersubjectivity"—I would disagree with some, who seem to believe that "intersubjectivity" involves and adherence to pre-established norms formulated by prior thinkers, and would argue that intersubjectivity is essentially when multiple seemingly disparate worldview can be integrated into one worldview that equally represents all of the perspectives of those who came together to bring it into existence.

Of course, this approach to argument takes much more time than the current tradition of showing that one's position is more "valid" than another's, but it also helps to avoid the potential dangers of taking a single, essentialized answer to a particular question for granted, thus limiting people's abilities to search for a genuine ultimate truth (which seems to me to be most accessible through intersubjective dialogue.)

The questions, as presented, as problem(s) are see-able "that way" (wrongly, falsely) because persons with such questions (that way) are running around "in a box" with myths in their head. Really, this is how I am ABLE to see it; I have no such problems. This is UN-guided (misguided) philosophy -- something that should have been recognized for what it is, and in many cases, for a long time; such is the philosophy that has hindered behavioral science for centuries. But the very poor "science" history of Psychology let's it go on. That is all.

Brad Jesness - Oh dear oh dear, another natural science warrior, convinced that everything in the social sciences is a lot of nonsense ... Sorry to be a tiny bit impolite, especially to someone about my age. That Russell Walsh paper, cited by Christopher Zieske, analysing different types of arguments and 'rhetoric' is not such a bad place to start. 'Evidence', in a field where the 'object' of investigation is a Subject, i.e. a human person or group of people, is fundamentally different from evidence in a discipline that deals with inanimate objects. The former does, the latter doesn't display a 'within' of things, which is accessible to us only through language and an understanding of the symbols uttered. For that one doesn't have to study Kant, or Husserl, or Teilhard de Chardin, or the logic of 'transcendental' arguments, or 'intersubjectivity', all one has to do is read Popper.

Brad Jesness You say that my position is flawed, and yet you don't specify why. Would you care to tell me what exactly it is about my thinking, and, for that matter, the thinking of my entire discipline, that is so "misguided?" Once you do, then we can truly begin to discuss the problem.

Dear Frederik van Gelder

OK. Then identify the "box" you are in. What is the clear empirical context(s) for the questions? Nothing makes any true/real sense without that. If you can't identify that/those [(and it best be "that")] you are in, then you are in trouble conceptually; we (all of us always) are always in some "box"; if you can't clearly identify it, your thinking, like all thinking under those circumstances, will be "off track" (in a very strong and certain sense).

I may be a "science warrior", but I am a successful one. See my writings. I have properly replaced decades of Psychology with the empirical perspective and approach needed and the clear, proper, necessary and sufficient parsimonious view; ask AI and AGI persons, and they essentially MUST agree (see their work and compare it to Psychology constructs; NOTE the Psychology constructs that are not or never (I've only seen NEVER) used); I have the only workable Psychology system: my system is the only one with concrete foundations enough to be mechanized. This may be more than the typical stilted "science warrior" you have encountered has done. (I've seen them too.)

I cannot say more about the topic here (fortunately, I am relatively "ignorant" of that -- I didn't major in "spinning my wheels"), but I can comment on sort of the WAY people are here and the way such individuals will likely operate, to no avail.

Dear Christopher Zieske

You may have to tell me (OR show me why); otherwise see may last Answer for why (otherwise): I cannot help such thinking. In a way I did tell you why; it is thinking without any mooring ("adrift at see"). I can't see what you are talking about, so it is unclear to me (as it would be or is to many others). Such questions and surrounding thought are loosely flouting words about (based, at best, on partial meaning and out of a useful context(s); that's all I can see.

Brad Jesness Interesting—you seem to be rather antagonistic towards the subject by which you are able to produce such work in the first place. Your work comes from what, exactly? It comes from your capacity to think and communicate. To what area do such things belong? Psychology. Perhaps you would agree that such things as thinking and the ability to communicate belong to psychology, but you don't think there's any value in studying psychology. But then, I ask you, how are we ever supposed to understand anything about these capacities that allowed you to be so successful? Even if our discipline may not be as exact or have as many clear answers as other sciences, is not some level of knowledge on such a complex subject better than none? I truly do believe that to argue a discipline to be entirely useless, as you do, can only have negative consequences, not positive ones.

Dear Brad Jesness - my 'box', at the 'methods' level, is called philosophy, with special focus on the social sciences. At the real level, i.e. the empirical level, like for most academics in Continental Europe, it's trying to understand the 'macro'-crises that have afflicted this continent from about 1914 onwards. You, I gather, have some other 'box', but it's not so easy for the rest of us to look inside. Perhaps you would like to share with us your thoughts on that Russell Walsh paper?

Dear Frederik van Gelder

I see most philosophy as the mistaken/misidentified "box". This is why I denied being a philosopher for many years; and I only accept that title with reservations AND because I am that good. P.S. Your latest answer, again, is more than unclear.

Dear Christopher Zieske

" towards the subject by which you are able to produce such work in the first place. " is UN-interpretable. I see it as an ultimately vague THUS false assertion, AND with no evidence, direct or indirect. NO ONE I've seen, except perhaps me, has been able to produce ANY instance of an acceptable argument like that HERE on RG (and if RG is where you are, that is where your explanations are/or aren't). Otherwise:

NO one here on RG has been able to produce any convincing (or cogent) argument for what you now argue.

See my 3+ years of the damning outlook I provided on philosophy in the following thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_philosophy_help_to_innovate_and_develop_scientific_theory

Perhaps I shall regret the relatively little reason I did finally provide, when I admitted I can be seen as a good analytic philosopher.

How and why does the Questioner (and likely or perhaps others) seek to provide understanding " like laws of physics ". If philosophy provided SO MUCH, why would 'it' then seek THIS?

Dear Brad Jesness , you don't have to, but since you've made your presence felt here, perhaps you would like to share with us some of your thoughts on that Russell Walsh paper? Anything printable?

Michael Kowalik

As can be seen, my thought is not irrational or anti-rational as it may have seemed to be before. It simply seeks a transcendent rationality which avoids any kind of logical reasoning that oversimplifies any subject (Rollo May would have called it "trans-rationality.")

Michael Kowalik

With all of this, how does my original idea that rationality can consist of many ways of thinking (including logical reasoning, but not limiting itself to this) violate the laws of thought? I fail to see how it states that two different things are really the same thing... Perhaps we do not disagree as much as we believe that we do. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Psychology literature is the one that deals with the psychology of those who vehemently deny that psychology is a discipline or that they themselves ‘have’ a psychology. When I myself studied medicine, a very long time ago, it was the heyday of the ‘unified science’ movement, the conviction that the natural sciences provide the foundation for everything else. The epistemology of this all goes back to Russell and Moore, and the schools of ‘logical atomism’ and ‘logical positivism’, laying the foundation for what is still called, to this day ‘Analytic Philosophy’. It’s a powerful way of keeping all personal opinions and everything to do with ‘subjectivity’ out of the kind of research for which we all depend for the wherewithal of life - basically: the whole of the material world. If there’s a justified expectation that we’re going to be spared the worst of the ravages of this pandemic we’re all living through, that expectation is based squarely on a ‘natural science’ approach to everything that is now threatening the health of millions across the world. If you’re an engineer or a virologist, you can’t ‘slip up’. That’s a ‘stance’ as old as Descartes, Leibniz and Bacon, and that gives us the two streams within Western epistemology that are as powerful as they’ve ever been: rationalism and empiricism.

Back then, during the sixties, what gave Analytic Philosophy - in the above sense - it’s political belligerence was the connection of the above epistemology (called the ‘adequatio’ or the ‘identity’ position: a='a', the word ‘dog’ is ‘identical’ to our sense perceptions of the same) with Popper’s war-time (entirely justified) polemic against the Communists: The Poverty of Historicism. This basically demonised some very ancient directions within philosophy and then the social sciences, namely those that deal with the ‘within’ of things, our ‘subjective’ world of emotions, feelings, reflections, moral quandaries, fears and desires. (Popper even came up with the remarkable idea that Plato had really been a totalitarian thinker.) It wasn’t entirely successful - even Analytic Philosophy couldn’t deny that there was some mysterious entity that could be neither ignored nor adequately accounted for in scientific terms, called ‘Mind’, but that became a sort of seminar paradox for the edification of students: “The Mind/Body paradox is insoluble. Discuss”. Freedom versus determinism, objective versus subjective, so on. But what it did do - this belligerent politicisation of the technocratic mentality - is that everything within the social sciences, ever since, right across the board, has been faced by the monotonously repeated and aggressively uttered dogma: “Define your terms!” “Prove that you’re scientific!” “Show me your experimental results!” “Where are your outcome studies!” “That is completely obscurantist!” “That’s illogical!” That fitted in pretty well with a second trend that’s taken off since the sixties, and especially since the Reagan/Thatcher years: privatise everything, commercialise everything. Schools, hospitals, education, the universities, the prisons, the whole lot. If it’s not ‘evidence-based’, and if it isn’t potentially marketable, throw it out. No classical languages, no humanities, no culture studies, no arts. Treat them with contempt. If they have to exist at all, leave it to market forces. If the tourists like it, fine, for the rest, no government subsidies, no support.

But of course we do ‘have’ a psychology, or Jordan Peterson wouldn’t have become so popular. (Recently, as always, Freud.) As universities become employee-production facilities for large corporations it suddenly becomes obvious that if a society neglects everything to do with meaning, ethics, aesthetics, morality - how do I conduct my life, maintain a modicum of self-respect, relate to family, friends, peers, authority-figures, the opposite sex - that that society is in crisis. In the old-time university system, before the vast expansion and commercialisation of the sixties took off, it was the humanities (including theology, Bible hermeneutics, metaphysics) that made up their ‘core’; in the older European universities that’s often still the case, to this day. But in England and in many of its erstwhile colonies, that’s under heavy pressure. It leaves in its wake a strange belligerence in intellectual matters, always determined to shout down the opponent, to be aggressively self-righteous in areas where one really has nothing else to fall back on other than one’s own narcissism. One more of those terms that the assertive self-satisfaction that is capable of closing down debates like this one will dislike.

Frederik van Gelder ,

thank you for your reply. First off, I hope you don’t find my replying in English disrespectful - German may be my native language, and I do appreciate your addressing me in German, but my points were all meant as an extension of the discussion that was started between you, Michael and Christopher, and I suspect not all of them, or readers and further potential participants, speak German.

Secondly, I have been noticing an unusual amount of ad hominems in your replies - you recently tried inferring Michael‘s background from his RG profile, and now you did the same with mine. I am not implying any bad intention in your doing so, I am simply wondering why this is, since neither Michael‘s nor my own argument seemed obviously non-philosophical and in need of an ad hominem explanation to me. In fact, I have been wondering why you are not straightforwardly addressing either of our points, but need to somehow explain to yourself some purported shortcomings in our arguments - which I do find bordering on disrespectful. I cannot speak for Michael, but I myself am a philosopher who simply happened to write his dissertation at a graduate school for neurosciences and hence acquired a degree in neurosciences; but my education, my research, my publications, the research group I’ve been working with, all of them were philosophical in nature. To engage in some ad hominem speculations myself, from what I can gather from your own profile and from what you have been writing, including your latest social condemnation of analytic philosophy, I assume there is a deeper-seated animosity on your part, which I do not share. It might surprise you that I am not beholden to the boys’ club of analytic philosophy of the mid-to-late 20th century, but that my interest in it stems from my interest in clear argumentation. Personally, I have also been interested in the modern empirical cognitive sciences, and hence my specialization in (analytic) philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Perhaps that’s just my deformation professionelle, but in a philosophical discussion, I am not primarily interested in personal backgrounds, or motives, or history, or narratives, even though all of these can certainly be interesting and enlightening and worthy of systematic research in their own right.

In any case, (and that would be thirdly:) that‘s all so far been a rather long precursor to simply try to get back to the discussion at hand: What should production and distribution have to do with your alleged claim that the minimal requirements of rationality are to be rejected, which, frankly, is all we have been discussing so far? Perhaps that is obvious to you, but not so much to me. For the record, I did not try to twist your previous point, but simply stated that you seem to have aimed to supply an argument for why the minimal requirements mentioned by Michael, as proposed by both ancient and held onto by a mainstream of recent analytical philosophers, should not be applicable. And I pointed out that none of your deferences to certain practices - in technology or in the current COVID crisis - serve to undermine these minimal requirements. That seems to me to be a point completely independent of German postwar history, but, again, of course you are free to enlighten me about the latter‘s significance for our current discussion.

Frederik van Gelder Indeed, this overzealous enthusiasm for logical positivism and logical atomism has even, at times, found its way into the field of psychology. If one looks at classical behaviorism (some recent behaviorists take it to less of an extreme than the earlier ones—although not all), logical positivism seemed to be sublimated as the sovereign philosophy to apply to the study of psychology, with behaviorism's original vehemence towards any attempt to study any kind of subjective experience or other such aspect of consciousness not directly observable through behavior—all such aspects of consciousness were assumed either not to exist at all or to at best be epiphenomenal. This was all done in the name of making psychology a more "scientific" discipline, free from its philosophical roots—which became very ironic when the famous behaviorist B.F. Skinner started making a few rather philosophical statements about the nature of freedom and dignity (or, rather, the lack of freedom and dignity, as he believed both of these to be illusions—a statement that certainly cannot be founded in such a positivistic science.)

When we discuss the relationship between philosophy and science, the most common (and perhaps most dangerous) mistake we can make is to ever assume that our scientific methodologies are not rooted in any kind of philosophical assumptions whatsoever, and that we have thus created a "perfect" system of studying phenomena which gives definitive answers which we can always assume to be true. In reality, all scientific methodologies have their origins in philosophical assumptions (namely epistemological assumptions) which can neither be definitively proven right nor wrong. Thus, we can never assume that one methodology is truly "better" than any other, but rather recognize that each methodology illuminates different aspects of a topic of study. To return to psychology, then, phenomenology (as a research methodology) should be considered to be just as adequate of a method as all of the experimental and quantitative methods so intensely espoused by most of the scientific community, and should be recognized for its ability to illuminate the subjective aspects of a psychological phenomenon as they relate to the objective aspects of it, which experimental methodologies, despite their own capacities for gaining knowledge, are simply not equipped to gain an understanding of.

Of course, if phenomenology were to take the place of positivism, and positivism would then be the philosophy so harshly criticized, it would be no more desirable of a situation to the current one, which is why it is important to keep a pluralistic and dialogical focus to one's research (thus allowing them to conduct either phenomenological or experimental research, but while continuing to respect the other methodological approach and engage in a reciprocal and egalitarian conversation with those of the opposing approach.) However, it is clear that during these times, phenomenology is the clearly more threatened discipline, and so we must be cautious to raise more awareness of the adequacies of this methodology and the dangers of allowing it to slowly fade out of existence.

Hopefully our dialogue here can assist in allowing people to understand the necessity of providing more support to phenomenological research.

And to clarify, the reason why I felt my last response to be relevant to this discussion is because I believe that one of the aspects of rationality that is overlooked is what it is like to be a person acting rationally—in other words, what is the "rational experience"? How does one applying rational thought experience their self and their world? In most discussions of rationality, I believe that people tend to focus on more objective aspects of the topic—e.g., "What kinds of thoughts (in the cognitive rather than the experiential sense of the term) might a person have when acting rationally", or "What kinds behaviors might they exhibit?" I believe that the former questions are just as important to understanding rationality, for how can we truly know when we are or are not applying rationality if we don't even know what it is like to be rational?

Dear Christopher Zieske

The " overzealous enthusiasm for logical positivism and logical atomism " seems to be opposed to a complete lack of strict grounding empiricism (see the terrible concepts of the '"meta" this and that' AND "executive functioning"). Requiring such empirical grounding (as I indicate) with each major step in one's conceptualization is merely an absolute requirement OF ANYTHING WHICH IS (or proclaims to be) A SCIENCE. THAT last statement is NOT disprovable.

You are basically just name-calling and casting aspersions (and this about REQUIRED ASPECTS OF SCIENCE ITSELF).

And, you say, " ... if phenomenology were to take the place of positivism, and positivism would then be the philosophy so harshly criticized, it would be no more desirable of a situation to the current one." Really?? One and/or the other comprises EVERYTHING. Are you so encouraging pure "arm-chairing" -- the blight of philosophy on behavioral science for centuries?

All my theory is clearly based in key phenomenology (specifically, directly observable overt phenomenon (in behavior science: in directly observable overt BEHAVIOR PATTERNS)). IN CONTRAST: Philosophers mainly just "stir things up" to make major questions seem unanswerable. I've seen that AND I KNOW IT.

NO one supplies more "support to phenomenological research" than I do.

Let me do you a favor and give you a question related to Psychology worth working on (AS I HAVE ALREADY): What IS it that is both bottom-up and top-down at the same time? (And, this would also end any nature/nurture conceptual conflicts TOO.) Find that in my writings and "try that on"; or, also work on such a question (which is NOT an oxymoron).

I'm grateful to Christopher Zieske for nudging this discussion back to the original topic, namely the relationship between rationality, normativity, and nature. Manas kumar Sahu seems to have withdrawn from this debate, though one could guess that one of his motives (reasons?) for bringing up this whole thread in the first place is that he's puzzling over the normative implications of the current advances in AI. Important enough.

That motives/reasons distinction though may be worth dwelling on for a bit, since it's clear that for several participants to this debate 'conditions-for-the-possibility-of' types of argumentations (also known as 'transcendental', or 'a priori', or 'meta- 'arguments) act like a red rag to a bull. One gets accused of arguing 'ad hominem', of lacking clarity of argumentation, or of bearing some deep animosity to the world at large. (Or for one participant, of not being sufficiently appreciative of his genius.)

The original paper that Manas kumar Sahu put up for discussion - that Jonathan Way paper - is 'analytic' in this specific sense, in its premisses, that questions of logic and questions of ethics or 'moral probity' are dealt with on the same 'level', i.e. abstractly, without much interest in either the history of ideas or the real history of the West over the last several centuries, or in questions of individual motivation or psychology. That's a venerable tradition going back to Descartes - this 'abstract' approach - , and it was powerfully revived at the beginning of the 20th Century by the logical positivists and the logical atomists. Since then this 'positivism' has been questioned from various perspectives - not least from that of the so-called 'late' Wittgenstein -, but most directly from the disciplines that are directly hindered in their work by such 'positivist' blinkers, namely the social sciences. If one leaves aside the hotly controversial area of Political Economy, then Psychology seems the next area where it's impossible to ignore the 'within' of things (more broadly: the old subject/object 'dialectic') as Skinner and the behaviourists tried from the fifties onwards. Why the insistence that the 'Verstehen' side of things cannot possibly be ignored - most especially in the social sciences - can be construed as somehow insulting at the personal or the career level is something I'll leave to those who've adopted this eccentric position to explain. In Sociology this interpretive/hermeneutic side of things has been mainstream since Max Weber and Parson - in Psychology since Chomsky's celebrated demolition of Skinner during the sixties. (It can still be consulted here: https://chomsky.info/1967____/ )

If someone coming from Psychology says: look, the relationship of rationality, normativity, nature has all kinds of aspects to it that can't even be discussed if one approaches this debate on positivistic (or for that matter: Cartesian) premisses, then that is exactly what the tradition that I come from - 'critical theory' - has been saying for more than a century. It's where we are in complete agreement. (Though it's not confined to 'critical theory': when I scroll back up this list I'm reminded that Steven Aoun made this point as well, some days back: a discussion about rationality and normativity can hardly be done without naming explicitly the criteria on which this is to be conducted, which then rapidly ends up in the welknown ''hermeneutic circle'. What all these approaches have in common is a scepticism towards arguments that insist these things can be answered by reviving the foundationalist approaches of a century ago - whether based on rationalist or empiricist premisses.)

Dear Frederik van Gelder

I DO find that many of the terms and labels used by philosophers rarely come up (at least in that form (as topics per se)) in/for Psychology. I have gone 40+ years without talking to any significant extent about "rationality" or "normative conditions" -- and I am no doubt better for it. It is not that the terms you trumpet are not discuss-able; it is they are rarely worth discussing PER SE (and other supposedly indirect discussions of them, too, are not of any clear value). Otherwise, how did I miss having these discussions clearly imposed upon me (to establish some sort of decent perspective)? As R.W. Emerson said: "Away profane philosopher ! seekest thou in nature the cause ? ... thou must feel it and love it, one must behold it in a spirit as grand as that by which it exists, ere thou can't know the law." It goes on "known it will not be but glad loved and enjoyed" (which is fine). It is better to talk in terms of adaptedness than "pull out" and try to have the perspective of a god. (I doubt we can have pure or, often, even clear rationality -- and about as much worthwhile talking about as "pure reason".) The approach (as in science) for ME is to not to define (or accept any definitions) of anything; RATHER, the Subject defines all (

@Joachim Lipski - When I studied neurology myself it was, during the sixties, in a paleoanthropology department with a strong orientation towards evolutionary theory. (It was a department with a mandate to explore what to this day is the unique fossil site of Sterkfontein and its environs - recently in the news because of Naledi and Lee Berger. https://www.maropeng.co.za/content/page/sterkfontein-caves ) Embedded within biology and (paleo)anthropology, a focus on neurophysiology does after all make some sense - especially as, back then, we were trying to understand the fossil record, the relationship between hominids, hominoids, and ourselves. It was the very real methodological problems we encountered back then which, during the seventies, convinced me (and many others) that the logical positivism and the logical atomism underlying the natural science paradigm as this had been taught since WWII was inadequate to the task. It was on this basis that I first made contact with Jürgen Habermas, and then started to explore the whole 'critique of positivism' direction within so-called 'Continental' Philosophy. (It resulted in my monograph on all this https://amsterdam-adorno.net/fvg1990_hbhm_aTOC.html ) (Especially this chapter may interest you: Ichentwicklung, Gattungsevolution, Wissenschaftstheorie, Zeitdiagnostik: https://amsterdam-adorno.net/fvg1990_hbhm_text2.html#ICHENTWICKLUNG )

The paradoxes inherent in the Darwinian approach to the past are many and complex, and some of them have come to the fore in this thread on the relationship between rationality, normativity and nature. Manas kumar Sahu puts it rather well, I think, when he says that this is a controversy between the champions of a foundational approach to these issues (i.e. the insistence that these things will clarify once we adhere strictly to the rules either of formal logic or to the empiricist program of inductive theories based on extrapolating from sensory evidence and 'experience'.) Naturalism versus anti-naturalism, was I think how he put it. "... give equal opportunity to both naturalist and non-naturalist [approaches] to address the criterion problem of normativity and rationality to give objective criteria (acceptable irrespective of naturalism and non-naturalism) of rationality." (Steven Aoun will then object, rightly so, that there's a circularity here.)

But 'foundationalism' itself, the term, has acquired an additional level of meaning: back in the sixties and seventies it meant recourse to either logical positivism or empiricism - nowadays what's been added to that mix is the neuroscience/cognitive science approach. Represented on this thread by yourself. It makes very ambitious claims: your masthead reads like the description for an entire university. For us ordinary mortals, used to thinking of morality/ethics/aesthetics - normativity altogether - as something that cannot be seriously discussed without recourse to tradition and at the very least a literary/scholarly canon, how would you answer the criticism that this is just one more 'category'-mistake? If from Kant onwards philosophers have taught us that deriving 'ought' from 'is' - norms from facts -, that this is 'illogical', self-contradictory, 'circular'. Why should we expect that insight into the very pressing moral/ethical/legal/practical issues facing society today could come from brain scans? Who would you point to as someone who has succeeded in doing so?

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Sahu & readers,

Readers of the present thread may find the following article of interest, "Intentionality Naturalized." This is a paper I presented at a conference in Bern some years back and which was later published in the Swiss journal, Dialectica, and subsequently in my book, Meaning without Analyticity.

Readers can access the article through Jstor:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42970672?seq=1

I believe that anyone can see the Abstract and the first page without need of a subscription.

The book is available from the publisher:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/meaning-without-analyticity-20

I thought I had made this paper available from RG, but I find that only the abstract is presently there.

H.G. Callaway

I'm very grateful to Prof. Callaway for drawing attention to this paper. I hope others too will download it and accept this as a friendly offer to pursue this debate at the level which it deserves, which is at the level of Western Philosophy as it has been conducted for the last several centuries. (I say 'Western' while being fully aware that there will be those, on RG, who will say: there are also non-Western philosophies.)

I haven't yet started to study this paper in detail, but I think one thing already stands out even on an initial cursory skimming: in part this is going to have to be a debate about the history of the analytic-synthetic distinction - starting with Kant of course - and the very different conceptions of a 'pragmatic' approach to the natural sciences that this gave rise to, say, in the period up to WWI, but also since the sixties of the last century.

The exchange on this thread, until now, shows just how thoroughly controversial this topic can become, both at the level of the methodology of the social sciences and at the level of just what it is that's to be made of new levels of empirical knowledge as they accrue within the individual disciplines. (Just so this doesn't sound as if I'm arrogating to myself an encyclopedism that I couldn't possibly make good on once we get into detail, I hasten to say that my own area of expertise is the history of psychology, the history of anthropology, some aspects of the history of political economy, and the tradition loosely indicated by the heading 'critical theory'. Since I once studied medicine I also have a fair understanding of the 'logic' of medical research. But like everyone else, outside of my own areas of expertise I'm a beginner.)

In terms of what has been discussed on this thread up to now, I can also imagine that the different meanings of 'foundationalism' in logic will converge with the different meanings of 'pragmatism' - but that's just a preliminary speculation ...

Frederik van Gelder

Apologies for the belated answer - I was not alerted by RG.

In your reply, you seem to continue ascribing positions to me that I do not think I have provided any indication to actually hold. You end your comment in „Why should we expect that insight into the very pressing moral/ethical/legal/practical issues facing society today could come from brain scans?“, and I am wondering what makes you think I would claim any such thing in the first place. (For the record: I am a rather ardent critic of such claims, but I never mentioned any of this here, and I do not see what it has to do with the discussion so far.) The simple fact is that there is such a thing as empirical cognitive (neuro)science, and hence there are philosophers of science such as myself who investigate it. That alone does not limit me to any particular claims regarding the (judging from your question: allegedly miraculous?) scope of cognitive science, does it?

Further, I do not know what you mean by „your masthead reads like the description for an entire university“ - what masthead?

And thirdly, you mention paradoxes that „have come to the fore in this thread“, but do not state what they exactly consist in. The mere fact that there are natural and non-natural approaches to rationality and/or normativity certainly does not result in paradoxes, but simply in different coexisting views. Again, you seem to be concerned with some overarching, broad sociocultural or academic critique (which of course would be very natural coming from critical theory - it just so happens that is not my area), whereas I would be happy to just focus on some actual arguments to discuss the topic at hand.

Rationality is a complex construction. Rationality includes logical inference and avoiding inconsistency, but it also involves judgements where the rational agent is trying to uncover truths or at least be sufficiently right to maximise chances of survival. It is tempting to say that rational agent will always try to follow a strategy to achieve some objectives. That may be true, but rationality requires more by requiring the rational agent to assess evidence in support of or against a judgement in a way that is verifiable by another rational agent. I think that the requirement of evidence assessment is normative; otherwise the rational agent could end up supporting a judgement that is not supported by evidence at all. But judgement is often a matter of subjective likelihood, and theories emerge when accounting for the evidence which do not meet the currently accepted norms for acceptance. Examples of this include in science include Galileo's theory of cosmology and Mendel's theory of genetics. Thus rationality is amenable to the imposition of norms, but the norms themselves need to be adaptable to revision in the light of new evidence and new theories which account for that evidence.

Since there has been a theme in this thread about psychological phenomena, it might be worthwhile to add a few remarks on that subject (although it is outside my area of expertise). Firstly, any scientific theory needs to save the phenomena in the sense that it needs to explain or model phenomena that can persistently be observed. This applies as much to the phenomena of social sciences as the natural sciences. However, there is a significant risk that theoretical terms may colour the phenomena themselves; if one is looking for an explanation of a particular kind, one might find it. It is a debatable point whether phenomena are pure quanta of experience, and just be recorded and "bracketed" (as Husserl called it). The most conservative position is to assume that theoretical terms do colour phenomena, and be conscious of the implications that may introduce.

In the case of psychological phenomena, there is a sense in which they can be understood in their own terms, as they reflect humans reporting their own experiences. In some cases it is reasonable to believe that human behaviours can be changed by addressing the psychological phenomena directly in much the same way as if a computer program malfunctions, the bug can be found and corrected. In other cases, there may an underlying physical malfunction, which would need to be addressed by physical interventions. This is probably very simplistic as a way of understanding the human mind, but there is distinction there in human constructs (software and hardware).

Rationality is definitely normative. The "right" and "wrong" implicit in talk of fallacies, of example, is not an allegory but rather tracks something real -- a dimension of being responsible for what we claim.

By far the most developed (and, to my mind, most satisfactory) answer to your questions has been elaborated by the Pittsburgh School philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom (the last two being my "doctoral grandfathers").

For a good entry into their vast body of works, see the excellent little book by Chauncey MaherArticle The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy: Sellars, McDowell, Brandom

My endorsement of the Pittsburgh School's normative view of rationality, however, is not unqualified. For a critique of (and remedy against) the social constructivism that this school often flirts with, see my

Article Tracking Inferences Is not Enough: The Given as Tie-Breaker

and

Article Brandom, Peirce, and the Overlooked Friction of Contrapiction

Rationality, normativity, nature. RNN. We're used to dealing with these terms as abstractions - and when I say that, what I mean is that we're used to dealing with them the way the natural sciences deal with abstractions. In other words: the first reaction is to say: define your terms, what are your theoretical premisses, what's your 'methodology' in dealing with these abstractions, what's your philosophical/epistemological 'background'. RG being mostly a forum for researchers, engineers, the medical profession, everyone will understand when someone calls the above approach the 'empirical' approach. On this list, to date, there have been two dissenting voices, and they come, not co-incidentally, from the social sciences: those coming from Psychology have a problem with such a 'traditional' methodology, and so do those coming from the so-called 'hermeneutic' tradition. (Associated, from about the sixties onwards, with names like Gadamer, Ricoeur, but also - from the philosophical side - those of Charles Taylor, Georg Henrik von Wright, K.O. Apel, Jürgen Habermas. [There's also Talcott Parsons and the North American Max Weber reception, but these seem to have moved mostly, if I understand the general trend, in the direction of so-called 'cognitive science'.])

There is of course a third way of dealing with those abstractions, namely the purely personal, or 'subjective' approach. This here, this RG, is also a rather popular social medium for researchers and scholars generally - and now, which I find the most productive and important aspect of all: it is rapidly become global in its reach. "What do you think of love", "Are you happy", this kind of stuff, which I think doesn't belong on a serious forum - but that is then something that will need to be discussed in the context of just what the rules are, here on RG. That is, to put it in the terminology of Prof. Callaway's paper, which I hope we'll get around to discuss in greater detail: there's something 'natural' about my 'intentionality', about my opinions, about my 'subjectivity'. I can tell you all how I feel, everyone accepts that that is not objective, but it's tolerated, even welcomed, because it belongs to my 'identity'. The next person then entertains us or impresses us with their 'identity', but everyone accepts that that can't count as a serious contribution to science, research and scholarship.

RNN, rationality, normativity, nature. We're now amidst an unprecedented global medical emergency which is rapidly evolving into a global economic crisis - which at the historical level is beginning to look like a combination of the 1919 'Spanish flu' pandemic, combined with the stock market crash of 1929. Rather obviously, anyone intending to be serious ('objective') in addressing this overwhelming reality we're all facing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty14en9Bc9M ) is going to have to find a way of combining the rational with the normative, and all of this against the backdrop of a 'nature' that is itself changing in a demonstrable and frightening way. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaoRAlpKUW0 )

My tradition, that of so-called 'critical theory', is returning to its origins, which started out as a combination/confrontation between the history of philosophy and constitutional law. According to Jürgen Habermas, whose debate on this with the legal theorist Klaus Günther appeared in the weekly Zeit two weeks back, it's time we started to think about how all western constitutions (starting with the Dutch one, the oldest) have dealt with these conflicting demands: those between rationality, normativity, and nature. I've just translated this important exchange and placed it here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341766818_J_Habermas_What_concerns_me_is_how_even_lawyers_are_now_relativizing_the_right_to_life_-_K_Gunther_No_Constitutional_Right_is_boundless_They_can_collide_with_each_other

Discussion welcome.

Michael Kowalik

RG, because of this 'social media' component, does of course allow judgements of the type you've made, falling under the heading of 'subjective expressions of opinion'. A lot of people like them, but the question was, whether either steeping ourselves in the substantive paper by Callaway or the very fascinating exchange between Habermas and Günther provide a more systematic understanding of the way we make judgements in the area of rationality and normativity.

I mean, you've studied Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Ricoeur - it says so on your homepage - so you're familiar with a type of analysis of the use of abstractions (here: rationality/normativity/nature) that do so by contrasting these 'universals' with the 'particulars' of our current situation. Habermas - for one - is full of these kinds of analyses. The 'universals' are rationality/normativity/nature. The 'particulars' are those unprecedented historical crises we're currently in: Covid-19, followed by an economic crisis. I would have thought that RG is a rare opportunity, for those of us still able to sit in front of a screen and try to reflect on all this 'sine ire et studio', to try to work out how the science aspect of all this and the politics/economics aspect of all this relate to each other? I mean: common or garden polemics we can leave to the social media. Everyone seems to be enraged. We can leave the conspiracy theories to others; try on this medium to find some perspective that doesn't descend into the usual partisanship. It's what I used to think science and scholarship were all about ... So why go off on that tangent?

Michael Kowalik

But at the same time every one of us is part of a ‘life-world’ that functions according to an entirely different logic: that of individual and collective ‘identities’. Different life-histories, biographies, professional experiences, ethnicities, backgrounds, but above all: passionately held moral, practical, political convictions.

This approach - this Habermas systems/lifeworld distinction - when one examines it from the history of ideas perspective, comes directly from the Kantian ‘theory/practice’ distinction, and to that extent it has a direct bearing on what this thread is all about, namely the relationship between rationality, normativity and nature. (Also, and most especially, as far as their historical origins are concerned.)

I'm a bit surprised that anyone here on RG should offer us a straightforward conspiracy theory to ‘explain’ it all, but there it is. You’ve just done that. Perhaps you're having an off day. I mean, everyone is full of rage at the moment - join the club. (The choice is large.) Since you’ve studied this Frankfurt School tradition, you'll be familiar with the following passage from the Minima Moralia: “Begabung ist vielleicht überhaupt nichts anderes als glücklich sublimierte Wut, die Fähigkeit, jene Energien, die einmal zur Zerstörung widerspenstiger Objekte ins Ungemessene sich steigerten, in die Konzentration geduldiger Betrachtung umzusetzen und so wenig abzulassen vom Geheimnis der Objekte, wie man einmal zufrieden war, ehe man nicht dem mißhandelten Spielzeug die quäkende Stimme entriß.”

The meaning of the word ‘projection’, in all of this, was analysed exhaustively, after WWII, namely at the level of social psychology. As a Habermas scholar, you'll be aware that conspiracy theories are a holdover from a more animistic past, that they just don’t pass muster, once one subjects them to this systems/lifeworld test. This explanation/understanding distinction - which Habermas uses for the above methodological differentiation - has been exhaustively analysed, in the entire post-Wittgenstein tradition, from Charles Taylor to von Wright. (I wrote a monograph on all of this, in case you're interested: https://amsterdam-adorno.net/fvg1990_hbhm_aTOC.html )

Michael Kowalik

In an earlier response, you had criticized my take on the issue, calling it "dehumanizing" because of its attempts to embrace various forms of human thinking, claiming that logical reasoning and the necessity for distinguishing between that which does and that which does not make sense alone should be applied. I would object that such a perspective, which would divorce logical and analytic thought from more holistic forms of thought, is more dehumanizing. Logical reasoning alone perceives the world in terms of mere objects, each separate from each other, and never observing the relationships between these "objects" or, when it comes to human experience, observing the subjective aspects of phenomena (this largely stems from the Cartesian tradition of thought.) This is not to say, of course, that logical reasoning is useless or unnecessary, but logical reasoning alone fails to understand many of the subtitles of a situation, especially one in which human beings (who cannot be understood in purely mechanistic terms) are involved. This is why any normative feature of decision-making must account for more than mere logical reasoning and "sensibility", for their are many aspects to human experience that appear senseless or irrational, and yet are just as real to the human being as that which is easily grasped through reason alone. This is why I cannot bring myself to see rationality as a mere process of distinguishing between sense and non-sense.

I was a bit 'kort door de bocht', as the Dutch expression goes, in my comment to Michael Kowalik

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Kowalik & readers,

Thanks for your kind comments on my paper, "Intentionality Naturalized." I'm of course pleased that you found something of value in it.

You wrote:

Continuity is a condition of being in the same world, a presupposition of being per se, but it also implies that there must be some underlying, unifying principle across all possible systems of meaning. Without a universal commonality it would not make sense to talk about being in the same world, or about the possibility of “transition” or “transmission” from one system to another, or even about “differences” between them. A rejection of commonality would commit us to only One true system vs. many false systems, which in turn implies that there is a common standard of true/false, therefore contradiction.

---end quotation

It may be that I do not quite see what you are getting at in this passage, but it strikes me as concerned with, say, the old philosophical theme of "the one and the many," which can also be viewed as a version of the classical "problem of universals."

Let me ask, then whether a version of empiricism might count as the "underlying, unifying principle across all possible systems of meaning"? (Again, is empiricism "normative"?) Notice that empiricism as contrasted with classical rationalism, tends to build up system starting with smaller parts and observational evidence. We get a great variety of empirical sciences and scholarly disciplines. Might such "unifying commonalities" at which we arrive be themselves somewhat provisional, or subject to correction--instead of meeting traditional rationalist expectations of total unification and universal validity? I tend to think that philosophy aims at universality, though it fact what is produced is strongly conditioned by cultural particularities--differing from one society to the next.

Readers may find my take on empirical pluralism of interest:

See, e.g.,

Conference Paper The Meaning of Pluralism

This paper is the Introduction to my scholarly edition of William James, A Pluralistic Universe. See the publisher's description:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/a-pluralistic-universe-15

As James has it, "the pluralistic universe" is still a universe, though not as tightly unified as rationalism has desired.

H.G. Callaway

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Kowalik & readers,

Yes, the unity of empiricism is methodological and empirically contingent. It looks like we have a parting of ways.

But consider: If we agree in rejecting, say, the Cartesian conception of mind as a distinct, non-physical substance and "thinking thing" or made of such, then that doesn't really take us very far. We still need to ask, in detail, for instance, about the relationship of mental states or processes and physical states and processes of the body and brain. Since sense experience and the sense organs, influence what we think and say, and what we think and say influences what we do, there must be some relationship of mind and body. But there are obviously some empirical questions here, belonging to psychology, physiology and related fields. Your "commonality that cannot be dispensed with to even think about the subject matter," doesn't seem to help much. We have to look to the factual details --and theorize about them. This is a gigantic field of inquiry and empirical research.

Again, what of the physicists theorizing about the "cosmic horizon" ever receding from us, as the univers expands, and ever moving beyond observational access? What about theories of multiple universes? Are you going to rule against them a priori, ignoring the empirical results given in support? Whether they are right or wrong, rejection which takes no account of supporting empirical research and results surely belongs to the "high a priori road." You don't want to end up rejecting empirical science, I suppose.

H.G. Callaway

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Kowalik, Braun and readers,

Models and theories are in a certain sense "constructed," but there is always a question of "better and worse" concerning what is constructed in theory, where this is intended to function to comprehend, organize and explain empirical data and findings. Causality has a general grip on theory as a matter of its explanatory and predictive functions. In this way, "the proof" of causal claims, by empiricist lights, is in the particular theoretical contexts. "Ultimate proof" on the other hand is a somewhat contentious standard by means of which to judge or evaluate anything; and its absence is not grounds for doubting anything in particular. Lack of "ultimate proof" may best suggest merely that the sciences and scholarly disciplines, plausibly, will make progress in the future. We should not therefore be overly confident even of our own best theory. New problems may arise.

Of course we normally object to what is claimed if it involves contradictions of any sort. This may tell us something about our concept of "objects," or even our concept of "objects of reference," or objects of consciousness. But logic itself has changed a great deal over the last century or so. It has been reconfigured to better inter-relate propositional logic with quantification, it has been expanded to encompass the logic of relations, and the older Aristotelian logic of the syllogism has been modified and incorporated into modern symbolic or mathematical logic. Logic has become an active field responding to the felt or apparent needs of science and inquiry.

Kowalik wrote:

Gravity is an idea, but it is an idea so deeply integrated in our conceptual networks and agential identity that we simply cannot reject it without denying ourselves. In that sense the empirical reality and the mental are interdependent in a special way. Some ideas are indispensable to the “world as we know it”, and we have no means of replacing or changing any deeply integrated idea about a world without destroying its conceptual integrity and thus rendering ourselves mad or unreal. Apart from engaging with the world via the integrated causal pathways, like physical contact, our reality is beyond causal powers of our individual intentionality or a contemporaneous society, because it is an evolutionary process intertwined with evolution of life itself.

---End quotation

Here, I am not quite sure what it would mean to "reject" the concept of gravity. Perhaps this might mean coming to reject the idea that gravity is "fundamental" in the physicists' sense? Gravity as an "emergent phenomenon"? Perhaps smaller modifications of contemporary theory (Einstein's GR) would be more plausible in contemporary physics, as developments in the direction of "new physics" of quantum gravity? One notices in this connection that Newton's theory of gravity, in spite of its many great successes, proved itself somewhat less that "indispensable" to the "world as we know it." You claim that "we have no means of replacing or changing any deeply integrated idea about a world without destroying its conceptual integrity and thus rendering ourselves mad or unreal." But is not Einstein on space, time and gravity a counter-example?

My general point would be that fundamental conceptual changes are possible within the various sciences and scholarly disciplines, without "destroying" the "conceptual integrity" of the various fields of study. Biology, for example is still biology, in spite of the conceptual shifts from Aristotle to Darwin and beyond. Psychology shifted from ancient paradigms to idealist paradigms and on to behaviorism and back in the direction of recognizing the specifically mental, but the identifiable domain and discipline of psychology persists.

H.G. Callaway

Rationality is self-presenting (i.e. normative as a truth-claim) only in those modes whose denial necessarily self-presents whatever is being denied. Thus, trying to deny, for example, the need to consider rationality as having to do with logical consistency is methodologically problematic as the denial is made intelligible through logical consistency; of course, the problem disappears if you do not consider the denial rational in the first place. Now, whether rationality is real is another matter entirely, whose somewhat intractable facets hinge on what is meant by the term, "real". Nevertheless, any conception of reality that appeals to an inconsistent modelling thereof is not really a conception that can even be talked about in an effective manner.

10 June MMXX

Do you actually know someone who is rational?

Cordially...

ASJ

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Braun,

I believe you're due for a reply?

H.G. Callaway

Manas kumar Sahu When you are trying to answer this kind of questions it is important to consider the different models of logics and types of thinking that are out there and to ask yourself, is being rational following classic logic (dual models)? Because the text: "Way Normativity of rationality" approaches only classic logic.

While coherence itself is one thing in a system of dual-logic, in Paraconsistent logic (Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa) or even in Pierce's logic it will be presented to you such alternative ways of modeling that coherence will not comply with what is coherence in classic logic, thus what could be considered irrational for Aristotelian's classic logic might play a function and pragmatical role that can be seen as "rational" in these other logic systems.

Meanwhile the rational requirements for abductive thinking, deductive or inductive thinking are not the same. But even when we are considering only classic models it is known that only 10% of people are able to rationalize correctly about conditionals sentences as indicated by O`Brien and Shafiro, results supported by numerous variations of Wason’s Four-Card Selection Problem, called THOG, formulated by Peter Wason in the 60's (CLARKE, 1996).

So, I would say that rationality, considering different logics and thinking models, can be naturalized through learning and interactions with environment (which includes biotic and a-biotic things), but each person having their limitations due to cognitive, linguistic or physiological development. Also in my view rationality can be both, independent and dependent of normativity, in vary degrees.

An interesting view on that comes from Charles Sanders Peirce. Pierce proposes a world of 'existing proposition' and of 'possible proposition', I would say that there is a field recognized as `normativity of rationality`, strongly attached to experience and paradigms as said in Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kunh that each of us take as acceptable as individuals and other as a collective.

CLARKE, Matthew C. A Comparison of Techniques for Introducing Material Implication. University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Private Bag X01. Scottsville, 3209, South Africa: March 1996

@Edilene De Souza Leite, I agree with you on the point that philosophers do not agree on foundations of knowledge that can establish the universally accepted definition and criterion of rationality and normativity, unlike the discipline of science. However, it is reasonable enough for us (those who try to avoid skepticism and relativism, which ends up with an epistemically nihilistic position) to establish a common ground to resolve the problem of normativity.

I need some clarification on the point that - "my view rationality can be both independent and dependent of normativity, in various degrees."

It seems to leads to the circularity of reason would you like to clarify this point.

10 June MMXX

Manas, do you know one person who is rational?

Cordially...

ASJ

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Leite & readers,

You wrote:

Meanwhile the rational requirements for abductive thinking, deductive or inductive thinking are not the same. But even when we are considering only classic models it is known that only 10% of people are able to rationalize correctly about conditionals sentences as indicated by O`Brien and Shafiro, results supported by numerous variations of Wason’s Four-Card Selection Problem, called THOG, formulated by Peter Wason in the 60's (CLARKE, 1996).

---End quotation

What conclusion are we supposed to draw from your observation that "even when we are considering only classic models it is known that only 10% of people are able to rationalize correctly about conditionals sentences ..." Shall we, then, give up on insisting on conditional arguments? Or, would we do better to offer more courses in elementary deductive logic? Logic surely tells us how we ought to reason, not simply what inferences people actually make (or fail to make).

How does this passage from your note help answer the present question? If rationality is normative, as most seem to agree so far, wouldn't this tell us to increase offerings in deductive logic --and perhaps also offerings on scientific methods?

Keep in mind that much in "higher" logical studies is pretty much purely theoretical--even better considered mathematics. These more theoretical reaches stand to logic proper, as "mathematical physics" stands to generally accepted and empirically well supported physics. Logic has indeed changed much over the last hundred years or so, but that does not imply that every conceivable alternative in theoretical studies of logic is going to be very relevant to the present question. The sources and alternatives are virtually inexhaustible and this highlights the value of generally accepted, basic logic--as in standard textbooks.

H.G. Callaway

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Kowalik & readers,

Teaching of logic is usually done at a more advanced age, and it depends on some mastery of language. I do think there is some need to guard against political propaganda and critical thinking skills are important in this.

I would say, briefly, that the current domination of political insiders was initiated with disdain for, and some suppression of, the teaching of logic. Nonetheless, logic and the teaching of logic have survived.

H.G. Callaway

Race, class, gender - three words, four syllables. Intuitively we feel that it must be possible to speak rationally about these words and what they stand for - if we didn't, we wouldn't be here on RG. Intuitively we also know that whatever it is that these words 'denote', we're not going to get very far without including a discussion about norms, values, politics, and somehow, even worse, they all have something to do with 'nature', or the 'objective-empirical' side of things, perhaps even something to do with anthropology and history. ('Class', after all, at the very least, in the sense of political economy, has had this meaning that it is not intelligible without including the historical dimension.) Race and gender - well, they sort of seem to have a historical dimension, at least in the sense that there seems something about them that is 'socially constructed'.

But they are words - within the English language. Of the couple of languages I know personally, it's obvious that as soon as you switch to a different language, the connotations, the historical associations, the cultural memories, they're all different. 'Race', for instance, is very differently 'encoded' in Germany than it is in the US - both in turn differently from the way that it is in Africa. For reasons that seem specific to the US on the other hand, 'gender' is much more heavily politicized there than it is in Europe or in the Third World. With 'class' it's the other way around: in Africa poverty, the Gini coefficient, inequality is much more emphatically present in the 'public sphere' than it seems to be in the US.

Within the social sciences, all of the above are really truisms. But not so, for some reason, for those trained in one of the technical disciplines: engineering, the natural sciences, formal logic. For researchers from these areas that doesn't seem to be the case - as we can see on this thread. They just keep hammering away at it: 'tertium non datur', formal logic. As if that's going to tell you anything at all about these really pressing, even socially explosive issues. Good luck to you if you think that on this basis you're going to understand anything whatsoever about what it is that is going on in the world today.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear readers,

Just a short remark. Philosophers are trained in logic, which is an advantage, but they are also trained in various other sub-disciplines such as social and political philosophy. Attaching negative connotations to "logic" of "Logik" if you prefer won't get the discussion very far.

Since social problems of race, gender and class all tend to be extremely controversial and hard to settle, one may come to the conclusion that they are usually not settled in hot mutual confrontations of organized groups. We are very skeptical, for instance of the traditional Marxist call for "international (class) civil war." Conflicts do tend to form groups with greater "solidarity," but such groups also tend to be more rigid and less "plastic" or flexible.

The best thing for "pressing, explosive issues" may be to observe that they do not often get solved in the short-run or by means of hot confrontations and action oriented conflicts. Perhaps a bit of "sweet reason" may be more helpful?

H.G. Callaway.

Frederik,

in (attempts at) solving social problems, such as those concerning „race“ (which in fact does not denote any real difference between humans), class and gender, logic is necessary, but far from sufficient.

Why would you even require logic to solve these problems? Would you require art, medicine or engineering to solve these problems?

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Lipski & readers,

You would need logic simply in order to be aware of the consequences of any assumptions, general theses or postulates employed.

Right?

Social and political theory will go nowhere without some skill at logic. Illogical action will likely run a muck.

H.G. Callaway

The 'tertium non datur' comes from a venerable, pre-Kantian epistemology, in which Logic and the Psychological are thought of as 'one', indivisible, 'identical'. In some ways that is, in contemporary epistemology, a hold-over from Aristotle and the cosmology of the Ancients - there's still a 'holism' there, at least in the sense that for rationalists reliable knowledge is deductive, taking its starting point from the eternal and timeless validity of the laws of formal logic. Its what gives all rationalists - as soon as they're not doing mathematics, AI, or programming - their characteristically pedantic air. I provide a quote here from a book that I may be translating: Adorno's Theory of Knowledge. (The German original here: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/nachgelassene_schriften_abteilung_iv_vorlesungen-theodor_w_adorno_58720.html )

Perhaps Prof. Callaway would be kind enough to provide a commentary on this passage, since it gets us to a question that's been at the fulcrum of the 'Analytic/Continental' controversy for at least the past several decades, namely the status of 'synthetic judgements a priori', which then leads on to that above mentioned question that is so crucial for the Psychologists: the relationship logic/psychology. (Or to put it in the terminology of his paper: whether 'intentionality' can be treated as a 'naturalistic' category, whether this whole line of thought is fallacious, and on the basis of which argumentation.) Here's the quote (my own translation):

----------------------

"The pre-Kantian subjective thinkers, rationalist as well as empiricist, tried to reduce objectivity to subjectivity. They saw their essential task as either dissolving and replacing the dogmatic notions of objective entities, [Wesenheiten] (truths valid in themselves), replacing these instead with recourse to subjective thinking. Or on the other hand they saw their task as that of dismantling the notions of objectivity that we have in our day-to-day pre-scientific consciousness altogether - as something merely subjective [in the pejorative sense], stripping them of any value that they may have in their own right. The most important thing that happens in Kant's epistemology (here I'm confining myself for the moment to Kant the epistemologist) - and here you can already see the paradoxical, the aporetic side of this philosophy very well - is that Kant did not, like his immediate predecessors, the empiricists, try to abolish objectivity as merely subjective, but to establish the concept of objectivity in its entirety through an analysis of subjectivity. If I referred in a previous lecture to the paradox of a notion of objectivity leading to an epistemology where the subject recognizes nothing but itself, then this is precisely what characterizes the Kantian approach, which tries to save the objectivity of knowledge by making subjectivity the measure of objectivity. And in this, too, the post-Kantian idealists, Fichte and Hegel for example, have been, one could almost say, the executors of Kant's intentions - or the honest brokers of Kant's philosophy -, inasmuch as they then, as far as Kant's procedure is concerned, really gave it a name, put the cuff on the cat and said: Well then, if that is how it is, if objectivity is founded in subjectivity, then subject and object are actually identical, then the absolute knowledge of the Absolute Subject about itself is at the same time the only true knowledge of the objective world that is conceivable for us all. The fundamental intention or the new element of Kantian thought, however, is now to save objectively valid knowledge through an analysis of subjectivity, and this objectivity that needs to be salvaged appears to him first and foremost as a given - in the form of scientific consciousness, which already manifests such an objectivity, that is, it has to be rescued in the form in which it is available, namely in the form of generally valid scientific knowledge. Science should therefore - one could perhaps overstate the case here a bit -, take on the emphatic responsibility of assuming the legacy of ontology altogether. The structure of reason, the organization of those laws that are produced by rationality, that are founded by reason, that in their turn dictate the spirit of nature, this should take the place of the lost theological order."

----------------------

(P. 245.)

Philadelphia, PA

Dear van Gelder,

You wrote:

The 'tertium non datur' comes from a venerable, pre-Kantian epistemology, in which Logic and the Psychological are thought of as 'one', indivisible, 'identical'. In some ways that is, in contemporary epistemology, a hold-over from Aristotle and the cosmology of the Ancients ...

---End quotation

The "law of excluded middle," say, not (P & not-P) need not be regarded in quite the way you have it here--as I have already argued regarding logic generally. One contrary view is that logic is normative, describing how we may best think in making deductive inferences not how anyone in particular does think. It seems pretty obvious that people do sometimes make bad inferences, though aiming for deductive demonstration.

In consequence, the rest of what you go on to say seems to be a matter of a "rabbit hole" best avoided in the present context?

H.G. Callaway

Dear H.G. Callaway , I guess I'm saying doing a bit of history of philosophy lands us as it were not in Alice in Wonderland but in an area in the social sciences of some importance: the relationship between logic and psychology. One can be in complete agreement with the statement that "logic is normative", but you will find that in the history of psychology this has been interpreted in completely contradictory ways - depending on which side of the Kantian/Cartesian dualism one follows. (Are we talking research methodology or are we talking empirical studies into the way - say children [the Kohlberg debates] - get to specific moral-ethical judgements? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg ) These are very famous controversies, after all, about what it is that is meant by saying 'logic is normative'. (My favourite one is between Freud and Wagner-Jauregg. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/freud-and-wagnerjauregg-a-historiographical-study/37B94E4410A36D6FA25AB007566AB3D8# ) And these are not resolved by fiat, but by exploring the epistemology; what it is that we meant by 'methods'. My position - following so-called 'Continental' philosophy - is that abstractions like rationality/normativity/nature require detailed historical 'reconstructions'. They can't just be 'defined'; one can't just handle them the way mathematicians deal with abstractions. Even the word 'logic' is ambiguous - depending on whether one takes the Hume-Russell or the Kant-Hegel direction. The decisions one makes here are not 'rabbit-hole' stuff; they have profound consequences for the social sciences.

There is much discussion in this thread about the necessity of formal logic for combatting such social and political issues as propaganda, conformity influences, etc. I must say that I do not exactly see how this follows from the tertium non datur or laws of thought that we've been discussing so far. It seems well established to me that the point of the tertium non datur is simply to avoid confusion in the subject of a particular discourse, not allowing one topic of thought to be confused with another.

I already have objections here, as the labels that we give to certain phenomena, such as "reason" as opposed to "intuition", are largely our own construction. This means that there is ambiguity in what exactly these words may mean, and thus the same word can very easily refer to things that seem completely separate from one another. Also, phenomena/concepts that seem completely antithetical to each other can just as easily be much more compatible with each other than would seem on the surface.

This, however, is not the main point I want to raise. The main point that I want to raise is that, even assuming that the "laws of thought" were completely indisputable (which is not a confirmed fact, and to say that it is so because of the number of appeal who agree with them would be a conformity bias not much different to that which we seem to be opposing in this thread), it does't seem to me that they would necessarily have much of an answer to these sociopolitical issues. How does distinguishing between one phenomenon and another help to combat the attempts by certain people to say that "these" people are "our" sworn enemies, or that their own group is simply the sovereign group over all others? To me, this is not a discussion of failed understanding of logical principles, but more so a discussion of understanding human motives. To guard against the successes of propaganda (or other such social phenomena), what we need is the ability to understand why someone is saying what they are saying, and what they hope to accomplish with it. "Reason"—or "rational thought", if you prefer—can certainly assist us in combatting this, but not as logic alone. In order to accomplish this task, "reason" must go beyond formal logic to include understanding. Only then will we be able to counteract these destructive social forces.

Frederik van Gelder To join in on your discussion of the relationship between "logic" and "psychology", I will assert that logic is essentially a psychological phenomenon, and so understanding the logic that one uses when making an argument must always entail an understanding of the person's own consciousness. Thus, logic must always be turned back upon itself—one cannot simply make an argument based off of what they believe to be "logical" principles, but one must examine oneself to bring to the surface why, exactly, they believe these principles to be logical.

This is also why I believe that logic is not necessarily less biased than other approaches to understanding phenomena or making decisions—because it comes from one's own consciousness just as all other psychological faculties do, it is prone to the very same biases that the person carries. The best way to approach objectivity as closely as one can is to be conscious of one's own biases and to admit to them, thereby allowing for dialogue with others who have biases of their own, but which differ from one's own biases. Through this dialogue, all participants' biases can be transcended, and the consensus that hopefully arises from dialogue can give the most objective account of the phenomenon under discussion.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Zieske & readers,

You wrote:

It seems well established to me that the point of the tertium non datur is simply to avoid confusion in the subject of a particular discourse, not allowing one topic of thought to be confused with another. ...

To guard against the successes of propaganda (or other such social phenomena), what we need is the ability to understand why someone is saying what they are saying, and what they hope to accomplish with it. "Reason"—or "rational thought", if you prefer—can certainly assist us in combatting this, but not as logic alone. In order to accomplish this task, "reason" must go beyond formal logic to include understanding. Only then will we be able to counteract these destructive social forces.

---End quotation

Agreed. We need to be clear on the subject-matter in order to have productive exchanges and make any progress with a problem or question.

I would add that understanding "why someone is saying what they are saying," the "teleology" or purpose or point of a comment, is closely connected with identifying what is being said or "what they are saying."

Consider: If I've figured out that my house cat typically wants to go out at a certain point in the evening, say, just after dark, or that she wants food put into the feeding bowl in the mornings, then (with needed cautions against anthropomorphism), I also know what she's "thinking" or feeling at those points in time.

Thus, the common place: "No remark without remarkability." We want to know the point of the remark in order to better understand it; and this is particularly important in clarifying the agreed subject-matter.

H.G. Callaway

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Zieske & readers,

You wrote:

To join in on your discussion of the relationship between "logic" and "psychology", I will assert that logic is essentially a psychological phenomenon, and so understanding the logic that one uses when making an argument must always entail an understanding of the person's own consciousness.

---End quotation

I'm afraid that the connection between logic and psychology is much weaker. If logic, or scientific methods generally, have meaningful normative force, then it must be psychologically possible to conform human thought and inference by means of prescribed forms or methods. It must be psychologically possible, say to improve logical skills by means of training in logic--just as it is possible to improve mathematical skills by training in mathematics. Give a test in deductive reasoning to a group of students, before and after their attending a course in elementary logic. Generally, I would bet on the results.

That there are varieties of logic, historically and theoretically, I think few will doubt. But the central question concerns not the mere possibility of "bias" in logic, we are reasonably more concerned with any actual problem introduced into the discussion. Allegations of bias are easy, proof of such is much more difficult, though not perhaps in "ideological" districts of debate.

H.G. Callaway

H.G. Callaway I think I am beginning to understand what you are attempting to say better—you mean to say that in order to be able to detect the underlying motives of someone's statements or actions, we need to understand what is being said as what is being said, rather than as something else entirely. This much I most certainly agree with. However, I suppose that what I had meant to say in my response above was that the effects of harmful sociopolitical phenomena don't necessarily rely on a confusion of what is being said—it seems to me that most people are rather clear on what they are being told, which is why they are so quick to act on it (if a propagandist produced propaganda that was completely illogical and confusing a to what was being stated, the propaganda would likely not be very successful.) What seems to me to be the issue of counteracting the success of such phenomena is understanding the why behind what is being said, and this is where formal logic seems not to have many answers. It can help us to understand the "what" (again, I think that more approaches to the question of "what" is being discussed should be taken into consideration than just the traditional "laws of thought", but that is a different discussion altogether), but that seems to me to be as far as it can take us. At some point, we must decide that we have an understanding of the "what" of the problem and move on to understand the "why." Does this help to clarify what exactly my stance is?

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Zieske & readers,

You wrote:

I think I am beginning to understand what you are attempting to say better—you mean to say that in order to be able to detect the underlying motives of someone's statements or actions, we need to understand what is being said as what is being said, rather than as something else entirely. This much I most certainly agree with. However, I suppose that what I had meant to say in my response above was that the effects of harmful sociopolitical phenomena don't necessarily rely on a confusion of what is being said ...

---End quotation

I think we have no disagreement on these points. Nor do I hold that formal logic, let alone the traditional "laws of thought," in isolation answer all related questions. It seems obvious, on the contrary, regarding methods and methodology generally, that their significance and use depends on detailed knowledge of particular sciences and scholarly disciplines. This is to say, by the way, that "epistemology" is not itself "a priori, or known independent of theoretical-empirical developments. Who would have thought, for instance that it would be possible to test Newton's theory of gravity by observing the displacement of starlight in the vicinity of a total eclipse of the sun --except in light of Einstein's proposals of an alternative general theory of space, time and gravitation?

You also wrote:

if a propagandist produced propaganda that was completely illogical and confusing as to what was being stated, the propaganda would likely not be very successful.) What seems to me to be the issue of counteracting the success of such phenomena is understanding the why behind what is being said, ...

---end quotation

On the contrary, I suppose that propaganda is often confused and illogical. That is why it is often ignored by more clear-minded people. But the propagandist's expectation is that logical and factual niceties will largely be ignored among an already discontented or partly organized mass. It is a technique of appeal to heightened emotion and often employed, leastwise in extreme cases, in the manner of demagogic distraction from genuine and deeper problems. In extreme cases, it will often involve scapegoating and unjustified factual claims. One approach to understanding what the propagandist may be aiming at is to simply cross-examine the sources and question the apparently illogical elements--and this involves appeal to better established, more creditable sources: fact checking. Of course, formal logic in complete isolation, will only give us an organized account of the logical truths, and valid forms of inference, such as "If P, then P," and on the assumption that P and "if P then, Q," then "Q" may be correctly inferred. etc., etc. But it also provides a means, as you remark, of helping to specify the subject-matter and checking on the consistent use of terms in debate.

H.G. Callaway