(June 18, 2014 at 5:49 am)fr0d0 Wrote:(June 17, 2014 at 10:22 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: How precisely does one gather information without using one's senses? It's my contention that rationalism and empiricism cannot stand alone - or at the very least, are weak when they do.
You're being facetious. Written information is transference of ideas rather than direct experience. It's 2nd hand information to be accepted or denied.
I missed this point in my previous post. We're not thinking along the same lines here - you missed what I was alluding to.
Consider the classic deductive syllogism:
P1. All men are mortal.
P2. Socrates is a man.
C. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Assessing the validity of this syllogism is an exercise in pure deductive reasoning. Validity tells you nothing about the truth of your conclusion.
Assessing it's soundness (and thereby it's truth value) requires induction and experience - perhaps not yours, yes you could read about the experience of death and accept that all men die, but *someone* had to experience the mortality of humanity and inductively reason that all men are in fact mortal.
See where I'm going with this?
