Taffer wrote:


And that's why the comparison with religion doesn't work. The things which religious people take on faith are not obvious.

I'm trying to show the inanity of this line of questioning.

That's the thing. The premises are rational, even though you can't justify them. The basic premises of arithmetic (axioms) are just true. If there is a reason they are true, it is because they are true. There are principles (axioms) which are just true, and cannot be proven from any list of axioms which does not contain the principle to be proved. You can't justify or derive these basic premises/properties, they are simply true statements about numbers. They are absolutely basic and cannot be reduced to anything else or explained by anything else. What I am trying to say is, at most levels of discourse about the way things are, it makes sense to ask for justification of a statement. But this does not generalise to all levels. You can't justify these statements. They are just true. Some people aren't comfortable with this state of affairs but it's a fact of life. At least the principles which one cannot prove (without assuming them) are obvious.

It is not fair to compare religious faith with rational thought. Religious faith rests on the same ground as reason but also requires that additional leap of faith. The reasons for rejecting a religion are epistemological and not ontological (at least not on the level of reason or logic).

Furthermore, ideologies which contend reason may never be complete are intrinsically hypocritical because they are attempting to prove something prohibited by their very doctrines.

Hume would draw a line between "0 is the least counting number" and "animals don't feel pain" or "God exists". One of those statements is obviously true.

Inductive inference operates on the principle that the past acts as a reliable guide to the future (sometimes called the principle of the uniformity of nature). For example, if in the past the sun has risen in the east and set in the west, then, inductive inference suggests that it will probably rise in the east and set in the west in the future. But how are we to explain our ability to make such an inference? Hume argued that we cannot explain our capacity as a product of our faculty of reason. For reason could only come in two flavours, and neither of these can be used to ground our inferences.

1. Demonstrative or Intuitive. This sort of reasoning is basically a priori. We cannot determine a priori that the future will be conformable to the past, because it is both (logically) consistent and conceivable that the world stop being uniform. Hume here does not distinguish adequately between the uniformity of nature in general and the persistence of particular regularities. For it is open to a philosopher (perhaps of a Kantian bent) to argue that it is in fact inconceivable that the world not be regular in some ways. However, what is important, and what vindicates Hume, is that for any particular regularity in the operations of nature, it is consistent and conceivable that it might cease. Thus we cannot ground our inductions in a priori reasoning.
2. Inductive. We cannot appeal, either, to our past successes in using inductive inference, to the fact that it has worked in the past, for this would be circular reasoning.

Hume thus concludes that our inductive practices have no rational foundation, for no form of reason will certify it.

jwdink wrote:


Ahh. Then we agree. I wasn't asking "can reason defend itself in everyday situations realistically?" No, my question was much more philosophical and useless. I was asking "Can reason defend itself, or is it a type of belief?" It appears it is the latter. But I agree that to function we need to have some base assumptions and starting points. The question is, can reason defend itself as a starting point? It cannot. Fortunately, however, it looks like as humans we cannot help but use it as a starting point, whether we want to or not.

jwdink wrote:
...assuming that the person with who you're talking with is rational. Which, if they're a human, then they probably are. Still, you can't disprove something with reason if I don't accept reason as a valid method of truth finding.

I never said I was 100% certain that we can't know anything with 100% certainty. That doesn't make it a contradiction.

But let's try a little thought experiment. You try and convince me to be 100% certain of something-anything, and I'll try and see if I can find a way out of it.