(March 23, 2016 at 11:27 am)ChadWooters Wrote: When people talk loosely, they tend to say someone is being irrational when what they really mean to say is that person made an error somewhere along the line or failed to lacked knowledge of important details. That seems not to be what some AF members, like yourself, are claiming. Some here want to judge people as rational, or not, by the conclusions they reach rather than the process by which they reach them. In practice they are saying that your reasoning is flawless and if someone doesn’t agree with you then, they are by definition irrational. Are they truly prepared to call profound thinkers like David Bentley Hart irrational. You may think he is wrong, but irrational. C’mon.
For example, I do not think testability is required to justify belief. Like parsimony it helps guide people toward the best explanation of natural phenomena. The testability of a proposition (P) depends on two conditions 1) not-P is conceivable and evidence for not-P could plausibly be found.
If the reasonableness of all propositions were required to be falsifiable then some fields of knowledge would be excluded, like mathematics and philosophy, when not-P is often inconceivable. Measuring physical objects cannot not test the proposition that phi is an irrational number. Modus pones is a truth preserving structure because the contrary is inconceivable. In other cases, condition 2 cannot be met. No circumstance excludes or confirms whether or not nomena lie are behind phenomena.
Way to not address a single specific issue that I brought up, but instead go off on a tangent about justified belief. Bravo. Thanks for reinforcing my point.
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.
