RE: Justification for Foundational Belief
August 12, 2012 at 7:52 pm
(This post was last modified: August 12, 2012 at 8:04 pm by Angrboda.)
(August 12, 2012 at 9:58 am)genkaus Wrote: 1. Regarding your statements in support of emotion being foundational - why would you equate physiological reactions with emotions? Emotions are descriptive of state of consciousness, whereas physiological reactions are automatic and do not require a particular state of awareness.I'm not sure what you are referring to here. We are aware of physiological reactions through qualitative experiences which we call emotion. (Or by scientific measurement.) I don't know what you mean by "equating physiological reactions with emotions". I did no such thing. An example here is the notion of referred pain. We may feel a pain in a certain part of our body, but the pain is caused by a physiological state occurring elsewhere in our body. We don't experience physiological reactions, we experience emotional states caused by physiological events or conditions. To speak of equating physiological reactions with emotions is nonsensical. Physiological reactions are physical phenomena. Emotions are mental phenomena. A physical phenomena can't be identical with a mental phenomenon, unless one is perhaps referring to brain states.
(August 12, 2012 at 9:58 am)genkaus Wrote: 2. Regarding your first argument against foundationalism.If the statement that there are foundational truths has no determinate value, then the theory that is foundationalism is of indeterminate validity. You seem to be eagerly biting your nose off to spite your face. If foundationalism isn't asserting that there are foundational truths, or that it is true that there are foundational truths, then what is it asserting? Is it asserting that "there might be foundational truths but it's indeterminate whether there are or not" ? I don't think you have thought through the implications of proposition P being of indeterminate truth value. If proposition P has no determinate truth value, then foundationalism is dead.
a) Wouldn't the statement "'there are foundational truths' has a determinate truth value" depend upon the type of foundationalism you are practicing. It is possible that the foundational axioms you choose end up classifying that statement as indeterminate.
(August 12, 2012 at 9:58 am)genkaus Wrote: 2. Regarding your first argument against foundationalism.Indeed I do, which is why I noted it wasn't a completed refutation. However, it is not clear to me that P is a foundational truth. So at minimum, you and I differ as to it being a foundational truth. I'd say that, prima facie, it's a bad sign for any hypothetically foundational concept or truth that two reasonably intelligent people are diametrically opposed as to whether it is a foundational truth. Since you're the one asserting that it is foundational, the onus is upon you to demonstrate why it, proposition P, or any basic concept / foundational truth is identifiably a foundational truth, as opposed to another proposition, say Q, which is not. What properties and characteristics must a proposition possess in order to be considered a foundational truth. What procedure do we use to partition the set of all beliefs, propositions, or concepts into basic and not basic? (And, "because Genkaus thinks it is" is not a satisfactory argument. Also note that this is why I brought up the trilemma: if you have to justify proposition P on the basis of other propositions or concepts, you've made foundationalism circular and thus vacuous. How do we identify basic concepts / truths?)
b) You need to examine P a little better, because as I see it, it does have characteristics of foundational concepts.
(August 12, 2012 at 9:58 am)genkaus Wrote: 3. I believe the third leg is being improperly represented. Words need not be ultimately defined in terms of basic concepts but as basic percepts. Any description of that percept would not be of any use in understanding it. For example, the color red would be a basic percept and any description would not help a blind man understand what it means.You're confusing the criteria by which we distinguish basic from non-basic concepts (or percepts) from the concepts or percepts themselves. It's a question of identifying a common property or properties which basic concepts share, regardless of the specifics of the concept / percept itself. If you can't determine how to separate the basic concept from a non-basic concept, foundationalism is, again, dead in the water. I find it rather interesting you would define foundational concepts in term of percepts. Firstly, that seems to lead down the hole of naive empiricism of the Humean sort, for which we know there are significant difficulties. Second, veridical and non-veridical percepts are not reliably distinguishable, so that would leave us with a purely phenomenological perspective, which is a rather barren landscape. But the most problematic is that percepts don't have truth values, nor do they explain many abstractions; so just like Perhaps, you would be bankrupting the explanatory and logical power that we require of foundationalism, at the expense of defensibility. A foundationalism that doesn't give rise to, at minimum, a logic, doesn't lead to many interesting places. Percepts as basic truths doesn't lead to anywhere useful. (Ignoring that phenomenological perspectives like Heidegger's and Sartre's do lead somewhere, just not the places we, in general, want to go with a foundationalist theory.) (On top of which, there are many important basic concepts, or potential basic concepts which aren't perceptual; the concept of a group of things and the transfinite being just two off the top of my head.)
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