Reason yields theoretical knowledge such as the case with Mathematics and partly Physics. It is a prioi. The noumenal world as Kant noted in the Critique of Pure Reason, is beyond reason. It does not have access to the things-in-themselves. However, Kant suggests that the three "ideas of reason" (world, God and self) help to stimulate and unify knowledge. Clearly our ability to reason comes from intellect. He argues that logic must follow a secure path of science in order to yield correct conclusions or objects of knowledge. Where disagreement between people may arise, it nevertheless provides some usefulness or relevance. We only have access to phenomenological appearances, which radiate from substance. Reason may be pure or mixed.
If one goes by the notion that knowledge is a justified true belief then reason (aka justification) yields not theoretical knowledge but conditional knowledge: conditional on the truth of the propositions from which one reasons. If the propositions are true then the truth is not theoretical but actual.
Weeell.... At the most basic level one could take it to mean simply that one has justified / rationalised it to themself. But this leads to cases where it is clear that the person didn't know (by everyone's intuitive understanding of what it means to know), but what they believed was still true. E.g. if I say that I know it is raining outside because I put my left shoe on first, I have justified the belief to myself, but it is clear the justification has no actual bearing on the weather. So if it is raining outside, could I have actually known it from the justification? So the way I look at it, the justification has to be reasoning that is based on true premises that logically lead to the conclusion, such that if the conclusion was false, those same premises wouldn't/couldn't lead to its conclusion.
I am not sure reason is based on what you call scientific. But i agree, its important to use both parts of your brain, to have an understanding of anything truly. Thats why we have this duality. So i agree that reasoning is important, but i am not sure its scientific, or what ever you mean by that term. Humans had reason before maths and science. Well at least some did, as some must of worked out some stuff. Then they became the priests and early doctors of the human race. But like i said, i am not sure you can call reasoning scientific. Not everything to do with reason, comes from intellect, but obviously i agree that people come to better conclusions.
Reason is based on cause and effect, which is 2-D; cause=x and effect=y axis. Reality is not flat (flat earth) but actually exists in 3-D, with the case and effect of reason leaving out one dimension or the z-axis. This is why science, although rational, never reaches steady state. One is trying to reach 3-D with 2-D. The bets we get are evolving rational approximations. We can approximate 3-D with the 2-D of reason, in a way analogous to drawing 3-D figures on a flat piece of paper. Below is a 3-D representation of a ball, done in 2-D. It may fool the eyes as being 3-D, but if you touch the computer screen you can prove it is only 2-D. This type of 2-D illusion of 3-D can fool most people because they don't have the touch needed to see through it. In terms of science knowledge, one can be fooled the latest version is 3-D or the final answer, until the changes appear in a few years. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The reason this ball looks 3-D is due to highlights and shadowing. The highlights are based on good data. Since only some of the ball is highlighted, the data features is not all the data. The shadowing is connected to a right brain induction of emotions. This shadowing is often connected to the denial of the truth in other POV. Another opinion may also have good data that is a highlight for their 3-D ball. This has to be denied to create shadowing or else one will be selling the other POV as much as their own. For example, political opinions preach that each is the true way; 3-D. Each uses part of the data as their highlights, with the denial of the truth in the other POV the shadowing needed to create the final 3-D effect. Emotions need to be triggered to get the right brain involved so a 3-F effect can overlap. To some people this trick becomes gospel because they are fooled by the quality of the 2-D logic and data, in combination with shadowing, because the shadowing triggers the right brain for a feeling of logic/integration. Science like global warming and evolution involve way too much appeal to emotions. This is a dead giveaway for the shadow effect needed for the right brain induction. This creates the image of 3-D and fools many that each is a steady state 3-D model not subject to change. Pure logic should be without emotions and be drawn with even color that neither exaggerates some of the data to deny data, but treats the data with the same conviction. This looks flat but is more true to the nature of the left brain; it is what it is without emotional exaggeration. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I don't know what mathematics really is or how human beings acquire mathematical knowledge. One might argue that mathematics provides a framework for theorizing in physics, but I don't think that physical theories just pop out of human reason alone. Reason is a-priori? Even if we agree for the sake of argument that the logical framework of reason is a-priori, the content of our thinking doesn't seem to be. Or so Kant speculated. I'm most emphatically NOT a Kantian. He did seemingly try to put belief in God and the immortality of the soul on the same footing as belief in an external world separate from each of our personal experience of that world. I don't understand that. What is 'intellect'? This sounds like an argument for the reality of mind substance, similar to Descartes' 'cogito'. We experience thought happening, so arguably there must be some kind of being that gives rise to thought and experience. (I don't know enough about Kant to know if he would have agreed with that.) Kant couldn't define truth in terms of the correspondence between our ideas and external reality, since for Kant any external reality that might exist is transcendent and unknowable in principle. All that human beings can know is their own percepts and ideas. The universe of space, time and matter around us is simply imaginary and only exists within our consciousness. So the truth of scientific beliefs has to have some other basis than correspondence with unknowables, and for Kant that basis is the coherence of our percepts and ideas with the innate principles of reason. I'm not a Kant scholar and I'm unclear about what moves Kant makes to try to avoid solipsism. If all that we have access to is our own mind-generated percepts and ideas of 'tables' and 'chairs', what justification do we have for believing that other 'people' exist independently of our perceptions and ideas of them? Wouldn't they be just as mind constructed as everything else? I guess that some of Kant's successors (like Hegel) moved in an absolute idealist direction, arguing that the mind that thinks the universe, and us along with it, isn't any of our individual minds at all, but an 'absolute' mind, God in other words. Each of our individual selves is just a limited and ultimately illusory 'perspective', the sum total of which is divine consciousness. Divine consciousness is where all of the seeming contradictions of false thinking due to our incompleteness are harmonized and the universal system of divine Reason realized. (The Neoplatonic ancestry of some of this is evident and it isn't unlike some ancient Hindu ideas.)
Of course not. Mathematics comes about by observing nature. Reality. Of course not. Our thinking is based on our knowledge and intelligences (our ability to make use of our knowledge). We can only think and conceive on things based on what reality presents to our senses. What is a-priori is reality.
In an era long before computer programming, Kant realized that "organized preconditions" were necessary to yield percepts and thoughts. "Existing" functional templates were necessary to produce consciousness. Mind as a blank slate or empty box arbitrarily receiving raw input / influences couldn't accomplish the job. Thus, "a priori" in Kantian context refers to judgements "not dependent upon experience" and origin-wise might also have a little resonance with "innate" (though not in any biological sense). A noumenal side to reality or a "world devoid of appearances" wasn't beyond [speculative] reason in the sense of reason being unable to posit it at all. Reason just could not confirm any of its metaphysical hypotheses about such since by definition either general objects or things-in-themselves lacked just that: Existence as appearances or qualitative manifestations, spatiotemporal relations, etc. It was a negative proposal "supported" by arguments dating back centuries or consisting of intellectual content / evidence; not a positive proposal supported by empirical content / evidence. Kant's philosophy introduced the universal forms of the faculties (Sensibility and Understanding) that make possible the perceived appearances and reflective thoughts about those empirical objects of the senses. IOW, the scheme of an underlying system which made private and public experiences possible was a precondition to that and global to all rational or human-like minds. For the faculty of Sensibility, the regulating forms were space and time which relationally connected phenomena or brought the representations of things in themselves into changing coexistence with each other. For the Understanding, the regulating forms were the categories (concepts that allowed cognition / identification of those physical representations; and accordingly the creation of theories, empirical laws, etc concerning them). The figurative "interaction" between those faculties allowed continuing novel / contingent developments (the so-called synthetic addition to a priori affairs). This is why the emergence in the 19th century of rules for non-Euclidean geometries should have been expected (Kant: "...The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite..."). But despite those new, abstract inventions our everyday experiences themselves still conformed to the classical paradigm. As such, the speculative reasoning [theoretical philosophy] that the Understanding faculty spit-out was indeed limited to only making valid inferences about the sensible or natural world (not that intelligible world of the ancient Greeks and later philosophers). Metaphysical theorizing about nature (now conceived after Kant as "internal" rather than "external" in the transcendent sense) was eventually handed over both during and after Kant's lifetime to science / physics. The practical division of reason, however, was permitted to continue venturing ideas about noumena and things-then-themselves since such was not to be considered anymore as offering "proof" of anything (only submitting ideas argued to be outputted as necessary by reason). Kant, however, restricted his version of practical philosophy to addressing only ethical matters (free will, God, immortality). By placing the latter's grounding in noumenal territory, this freed science from the objections of religious traditions -- i.e., the clergy was not to interfere with natural philosophy's research of the phenomenal world; while science was likewise to allow religious pursuits (or Kant's neutered reformation of them) to romp to their heart's content on meta-phenomenal turf. "Natural science will never reveal to us [...noumena, things in themselves, etc...] which though not appearance, yet can serve as the ultimate ground* of explaining appearance. Nor does that science require this for its physical explanations. Nay even if such grounds should be offered from other sources (for instance, the influence of immaterial beings), they must be rejected and not used in the progress of its explanations. For these explanations must only be grounded upon that which as an object of sense can belong to experience [or tested within it], and be brought into connection with our actual perceptions and empirical laws." --Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics [*Which is to say, "ultimate ground" refers to any possible transcendent "causes" for specific phenomena that would be minus their representation in consciousness of being dependent upon the spatiotemporal relations of the sensuous slash natural world of experience (i.e., conventional causation)].
Theoretical knowledge starts with a hunch. Starting with a gut feeling, one attempts to build a train of thought and logic that can support the hunch, so others can see. This early train of logic is needed for a sales pitch leading to funding for research. This hopefully allows confirmation of the hunch with experiments, thereby allowing fine tuning of the logic. Once this is published, the thesis is organized in a logical fashion for the reader. The writing style creates the illusion, for the reader, the logic came first, since it does in the paper. But this is not what the creator saw while he was creating. They started with a fuzzy intuitive picture; right brain, which slowly comes to focus in the logical left brain. Once in focus then publication tunes the logic. The normal approach is why so much research is empirical. Empirical means sparse on early logic. In medicine, one gets a hunch to try cockroach testicles for cancer. They need to run experiments so one can see what happens with the hope of more insight and logic comes from the results. If theory came from logic you would not need to run as many experiments or use statistics to fudge logic. Blind man's prophesy (statistics) is important to science due to hunches being the starting point. Any oracle helps. This is nevertheless superstition and slows progress. It is often needed to due to the difficulty of translating right brain 3-D data of the hunch to left brain logic.
