1. Redundancy or "over-consistency" 2. Free Will, unnatural and truly random occurences Have I left anything out?
1. What? 2. What? But more precicely - why would formal logic account for free will? It's a language. And what do you mean by 'truly random occurences'? You mean the random of QM?
I mean free will in the context of human behavior. Here we are talking English, we're both cool with each other, we have expectations of each other. Or we use specific words, grammar. etc that follow logically with a specific theme in a specific context. To deviate would be a random occurence. Language forms thought patterns. Your thoughts are basically limited by language. Its contextual as is human behavior. I'm about 80% confident of this. The other 20% is random.
I don't see that logic is limited by these concepts or any aspect of human activity. Ultimately logic provides us a mechnasim for determining three states - True False Unknown Is there anything I have missed?
True and false at the same time, which is not really logical but can be symbolically represented and computed anyway. So really, you can disregard this point. I'm being a smartass.
I don't think one is unknown. I've heard neither but not unknown. But like baumgarten says it can also be both. As in a paradox such as Russell's.
Logic provides a way to think. But its only for efficiency nothing more. It can't help with habits or habituation. If a person uses logic habitually then they might apply it to too many things where its just uncalled for. That's what I mean by logical redundancy or "overly-consistent" application.
nicholas you don't understand what logic is. first off: logic can determine if the truth-valuation of a sentence is indeterminant - which is what cris meant by 'unknown'. This is the first piece of evidence that you have no idea what logic is. And in Russell's paradox the truth-valuation is not 'both'. It is a paradox simply because the apparent truth-valuation is non-existant. Of course the ramifications of the paradox may simply be that an informal language necessarily contains inconsistencies. Which is really not so troubling, except to positivists and other such logicists. And no, logic is not for efficiency and nothing more. And what do you mean it doesn't help with habits? I'm fairly certain you have no idea what the philosophic notion of logic is or it's applications.
Nicholas1m7: One can certainly ask whether or not such and such a habit is proper or useful through logical thought. In fact, the only way to evaluate whether or not it would be good to continue with something is to essentially apply logical thought to it. What sort of thing really would be "outside logic"?
Not even. You seem to think irrational behavior and stupidity belong under the same category. Irrational behavior in the sense I'm speaking of here, could be a willful adherence to "anti-logical" behavior. So if logic dictates that a person must follow this pattern or adhere to these rules, irrational behavior would take a shot in the dark where logic says otherwise. Does dying and then coming back to life adhere to logic? (Bio)logically no. Is a weakly powerful being a logical consistency? Logically no. Does a square-circle adhere to logic? Logically no. But certain mysteries have shown otherwise. Sure, we could say they're hoaxes, but that would be the coward's way out.
I admit I wasn't well informed about Russell but I wouldn't be so quick to rule out my other observations. I believe Witgenstein wrote philosophies that showed pretty much what I said in my response to you, but better. I believe our thought patterns adhere to a grammatical logic or syntax as that of English or any other language. The way our thoughts behave, is the way we behave it appears. So if our thoughts are strictly logical, we would behave strictly logical. Like a human computer. If its illogical, but adheres to something without substance, less tangible, then that will be the behavior. Language limits thought. Thought is limited by language. I would be inclined to think this is a minute gist of what Witgenstein wrote about.
Which of these three logical values would you use to label love with? What about omnipotence or life after death? You don't have to necessarily believe in these things, but what if?
Wittgenstein's main theses were not that language limited thought and vice versa. In fact, Ludwig would have argued that this was a pseudo-theory. He would have challenged you to give a precice definition of language and one of thought. For him, neither was a rigorous definition. Anyway, you're belief on what thought patterns adhere to is unfounded and a bit counter-intuitive. While there is no true 'randomness' in thought processing (as random exists only on a quantam level) that is far from to say that it adhere to some strict method. We don't yet understand the way thoughts work completely - neither neurologically or even phenomenologically (i.e. therapy, phenomenology - necessarily these things are not scientific anyway). If your thesis simply that humans don't act entirely rationally, then yes, bravo, that's not a remarkable insight. But that says nothing about whether we can discover irrational means of behaviour rationally or not. It just says the one person is irrational. There's an old saying: The fool acts irrationally from rational assumptions. The insane person acts rationally from entirely irrational assumptions. The former (if for a moment we can pretend such strictness exists) requires you to just discover what the liklihood of irrational behaviours under certain circumstances may be. From this we can try and learn why certain people are more predisposed to certain types of irrational behaviour. And so on, and so on. The latter we have to investigate why - neurochemically and psychologically (through many approaches; behaviouralism, social psych...) - the person makes irrational assumptions and of a certain type. From there we can classify types of irrational first assumptions and their often physical causes or roots. This is how we investigate the total system of 'irrational behaviour'. And unless you take Game Theory (or Rational Choice Theory if you prefer) as the model of rational behaviour, even this may not be able to be construed as a scientific term (i.b.). And as for something with 'less substance'... this is a very fuzzy term, you need to be much more precise to get a point across.
I don't give too much credit to the idea that language limits our thinking. Some people often have a thought that they can't find the words for. I think this might imply that they don't know the words for it very well, even if they exist, or they're thinking without words.
That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's linguistics, not philosophy, and most people disagree with it (at least, its strong form. It's generally accepted there's some effect, but not that language is the be-all and end-all of thinking).
Nicholas1m7: Define a situation that would fit this? I want to be certain that we're on the same wavelength, as it were, here. For most actions are done in light of an end. How do you figure? Precisely, but square-circles do not exist. Mysteries? Such as?
