Knowledge, A Priori and Absolute
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Follow up to: The End of Cartesian Demons
Editor’s Note: This is an updated and reposted version of a previous post.
I’ve now written a fair deal about knowledge: “The Origin of Truth” discussed how knowledge is derived by the interpretation of experiences, and “Meaningfully True” expanded this into a definition of “true” and “false”, which was clarified and emphasized in “The End of Cartesian Demons”.
While these essays were all rather lengthy and full of information, this essay will just be a short clarification of two points: what it means for knowledge to be “A Priori” and what it means for knowledge to be “absolute”. How do those two notions fit into the theory I’ve been writing about?
This essay is a bit more disorganized than usual because it is a summary of notes that I feel are rather relevant to the topic at hand, while still being a bit jumbled because they don’t fit directly into the narrative I’ve been writing, per se.
The Notion of “A Priori”
An interesting point to consider when suggesting that all knowledge is grounded in experiences is that of a priori knowledge, or the notion of knowledge that can be known without experiences at all. (The opposite is a posteriori; knowledge gained specifically from experience.)
However, when we look at what is actually merits the label “a priori”, we are met with examples such as the notion that “all bachelors are unmarried”. This is considered a priori because we need know nothing about who bachelors are and how they interact with the world, we need merely know that the definition of bachelors specifically excludes the idea of being married by definition; an unmarried bachelor is an obvious contradiction.
However, this is really just semantics: the people who mutter the words “a priori knowledge is knowledge not derived from experience” are using the word “experience” in a different way than I do, and I don’t feel the need to debate these definitions, but merely to choose one and stick with it.
For in this theory, knowing the definition of “bachelors” involves knowing what a bachelor is, and that requires you to have experienced the use of the word “bachelor” and to have derived meaning from it, further indicating a real or imagined experience of a bachelor. Only with these experiences, along with the experience of the law of noncontradiction, could one ever know that “all bachelors are unmarried”.
But does this mean that a priori knowledge doesn’t exist? It depends on how you want to squabble with the definition. I personally think that a priori is not referring to knowledge literally gained without any experiences, at least the way I am throwing around the word “experience”, but rather referring to knowledge we can simply infer solely by our experience of definitions and logic.
Distinctions in Knowledge
While it does seem that all knowledge is fundamentally derived from our experiences, it does make sense to distinguish knowledge based on which category of experiences we derived the information from. Possible distinctions would be whether or not the knowledge was gained from the scientific method, or the historical method, or whether knowledge is the product of rumor or hearsay.
The distinctions within knowledge also can give us some idea of how reliable that knowledge is, because of our experiences with other knowledge from that same category. We know that knowledge from rumor has often turned out to be true less times than knowledge gained from a rigorous application of the scientific method.
The idea of a priori vs. a posteriori also seems to be made based on one of these distinctions — if the knowledge is derived from our experiences with the scientific or historical methods it is often labeled a posteriori and that whic h is derived from our experiences with mathematics and the laws of logic are often labeled a priori.
Can We Have Absolute Knowledge?
Can we have absolute knowledge in our theory? Is there anything we can know for 100% certain, with no doubts? I think we can, with some reservations. Again, while many people say “absolute knowledge is impossible”, remember to beware of differences in definitions.
For instance, consider a tautology from the Law of Identity: “A is A”. I think we know “A is A” for 100% certain, with no doubts. However, I must admit that there is a minuscule chance that I’m completely mistaken about how logic works, or that I only think I typed “A is A” and I really made a typo, making me wrong. These background chances are what other people will capitalize on, indicating that I really do have doubts.
However, I think that these background cases are also needlessly nitpicky, and that once we forget about the possibility of typos, I know that “A is A” for 100% certain, with no doubts. So the existence of absolute knowledge really depends on whether or not you count those background cases, but regardless, we’re still pretty darn sure about the truth of “A is A”. As I spent a lot of time talking about in Part 1, we can’t even imagine something being A, but not being A.
That’s the law of non-contradiction at work. And if the law of non-contradiction is ever false, it will be false in a way I cannot currently comprehend, let alone anticipate.
Definitionally True
There is also another way I feel we can get some semblance of absolute knowledge: statements that are true because they are defined to be true. For instance, the statement “A bachelor to be an unmarried man” is potentially false because I may be mistaken about how people use the word bachelor, but the statement “I define a bachelor to be an unmarried man” is not the kind of statement that can normally be false, thus “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is definitionally true.
These also include some of the things that must be true in order for things to be true at all: statements such as “at least one statement must be true” must be definitionally true in order for other things to be true, and statements such as “I exist” must also be definitionally true, because denying your own experiences means you cannot hold anything to be true, because only things that exist can hold propositions.
This is the distinction between definitionally true and actually true, because definitionally true controls for those nit-picky doubts about whether we are mistaken with the words that we are using, or about whether we are using logic correctly. The idea that only things that exist can hold propositions is only true if I’m correct about what I mean by “exist” and “holding propositions”.
Like the law of non-contradiction, things that are definitionally true also appear to closely approximate the idea of absolute knowledge.
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I think “a priori” is like saying “magic”… but logic and definitions are not magic and there is no need for this term at all. The wikipedia article on “a priori” strangely side-steps this fact, not even mentioning anybody who thinks the concept is bunk.
I have never really looked up the defintion of a priori, just infererd it from the vast contextual references I have encountered. I had always interpreted a priori to be a truth that the believer has no actual prof of; or in otherwords, a type of faith. I think I like my interpretation better than the semantical one you have given
(no offense). The reason being the exact one you have pointed out: your defintion is purely semantics.
Here is where we get to the difficult part, because I know you will process what I am about to say as “arguing defintions,” but I think it is a case where it is important to do so.
I do not think you can use “A is A” as an example of absolute knowledge. “A is A” is a purely semantic construction. There is no such thing as “A.” “A” is purely fictional, a figment of the human imagination, so of course it is absolute. The sentence “A is A” was created for the sole purpose of being absoltue. As you have suggested, the only way to make “A is A” not absolute is to transform the semantic reality of A into A1 and A2. You can argue that A is not really A because you see A1 is in some way different from A2, but you still have not left the human imagination. This is what you call arguing defintions.
I aruge there are times where one needs to make such distinctions. I view knoweldge that is based purely on symbolic logic, and knowledge of the territory (using your terminology) to be two completely different things. It is misleading to say that “knowledge is absolute” when the only types of examples you can give of absolute knowledge are semantic ones. If you could provide me with an example of abolute knoweldge of the later form, then I would be persuaded; but if the only examples of absolute knowledge you can give are semantic ones it is nothing more than an illusion created by your logic to say that there is absolute truth.
Here is the illusion:
You have said
“There is such a thing as Absolute truth”
- The connotations of this word truth encompass a wide, vast, depth of information. To say there is absolute truth is to make a statment not just about semantics, but about relationships and territories as well. Even if it is not your intention to make such claims this is the nature of symbols. If you say “A is A” the second “A” refers to all the connotations of “A”. If you say “A man is a man,” then you are also saying a man is strong, independent, reserved, holds certain proffesions, a protector, a provider, a warrior, etc. If you say “There is absolute truth” you are opening this up to be interpreted that any territorial information, information about relationships, or semantic information can potentially be unquestional. The later I have no problem with, but the former two I will strongly fight against. They are dangerous ideas.
This is why defintions are at time important. The biggest problem I have with philosophers is that much of their writing is based soley in semantics, but they extract the truths they find in their symbols and superimpose them onto reality. I do not think reality is based off of semantics. I do not think reality parellels logic.
Your examples of absolute truth I would say are examples of as “Absolute logic.” I do think there is abosolute logic, but I do not think logic is absolute (not teleological).
Ok, and I’m fine with that, since you recognize that we’re talking about two different things. I personally just use the words “something you have no proof of”, “an unjustified claim”, or “faith” for what you are calling “a priori”.
The literal latin for a priori means “from the earlier”. The wikipedia article shows the common usage to be distinguishing whether or not the justification is experiential or empirical, but I’m arguing in this essay that all justifications are technicality experiential/empirical — if you had no experiences, you would not know anything.
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Right, so it technically is an example of something we can know absolutely. But I agree with you that’s not very impressive.
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If I understand you right, this is not an accurate characterization of what I consider to be useless arguing of definitions. (Remember that arguing definitions can be useful in some cases, as I do touch on in my essay “The Folly of Debating Definitions”.
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I disagree, sort of. The problem is that symbolic logic is knowledge of the territory, because logic are properties of how all systems work. If you had no experiences of these systems, you wouldn’t understand logic.
It just so happens that all people have experiences of these systems, knowledge is one of these systems, and we could never imagine a system that did not have these properties.
But I do make the distinction between that which is definitionally true and that which is not, which I’m pretty sure is the distinction you are making here.
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It’s not misleading because that is what I am saying: certain semantic constructions, such as things true by definition and the laws of logic, are absolutely true.
The vast, vast majority of knowledge is probabilistic and provisional.
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There might be one example of the later form: the fact that you exist. This is what I meant by “The Origin of Truth”: the fact that you are experiencing sensory perceptions is undeniable.
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I’m not actually making that statement. All I’m saying is that there exist some statements that are undeniable, because denying them would produce a contradiction. Beware of smuggling connotations.
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This may happen, but it is a fallacy. Again, beware of smuggling connotations. What you can criticize me for is poor communication, but the statement “a man is a man” is absolutely true if one does not fallaciously extrapolate any different meaning between those two statements.
The fact that people do preform this fallacy regularly is what makes statements like “I am what I am” so deep.
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I think I have this problem too; but that’s why I think arguing definitions is typically the problem, not the solution.
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I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I don’t have a ton of time to respond, but here are the two points I will make.
1) You say
“because logic are properties of how all systems work”
It is this statement that i am saying is false. I think logic is a beneficial human construction, but it is not the basis of reality. Substitute “A” for anything in reality. There is no “A is A.” reality would be to say that: All “A”s have a high probability of containing a similar cluster of attributes at similar levels of competencies. However, out of that category of “A”s any individual A has the capacity to
– Contain attributes that most “A”s do not; what i call Non-A attributes.
– Have competencies within Non- A attributes that vary the average “A”.
– Be missing some essential A attributes
– Have competencies within some A attributes that vary the average “A”.
To make this a little less abstract, here is an example.
“A person is A person”. – FALSE
A person is a category of structures that all have a high probability of sharing similar physical, mental, and social attributes at similar levels of competency.
-There are people born smarter, stronger, more creative, more emotionally intone, more imaginative, etc then the average person. (A higher level of competency in that attribute).
– There are people born with a lower than normal competency in any of the above listed attributes.
– There are people born with attributes other people do not have. (Sociopaths are born without empathy, which I would argue is one of the key attributes of the human category. Some people are born with no legs, no arms, etc.)
It is an important tool to be able to categorize into groups (like group A), but those groups represents our necessity to view the world in groups, not reality it self. We do not have enough knowledge or cognitive space to categorize humans into more accurate groups, and while we could probably make more accurate groups, there seems to be a strong likely hood that there are no absolute groups.
2) You say
“This may happen, but it is a fallacy. Again, beware of smuggling connotations. What you can criticize me for is poor communication,”
I disagree with you hear as well. I do not think it is possible to not smuggle connotations to some extent. To control the connotations of what is said is as impossible as to control the flow of people over the mexican boarder. The connotations can be greatly reduced, as the flow of illegal immigration can, but to do so is to increase the brutality and severity of your patrol; it is totalitarian (in my opinion). I also see it as a pointless endeavor. I argue that the “smuggling connotations” is not poor communication, but the basis of human communication. I agree with you that there are negatives to it, but I do not think it can be stopped. The ideal of communication without unintentional connotations is like the ideal of logical order. They are both fictions. I think they are good things to strive for, but in moderation. You have to be willing to accept that your logic and your connotation will never be true reality. I think it is dangerous to think of these ideal fictions, these theories, as truths.
@Tom
Your posts are great to read, I’d like to ask one or two questions, if I may.
1/ A Person is a person: FALSE
I’m trying to work out if you mean something like a person in a vegetative state, or perhaps an embryo, might represent a grey area, or if you merely mean people are not uniform.
It would seem to me that once a definition is agreed upon, among whatever beings use that language as a representative system, then X is X. I can see that the universe itself is not bound by our definitions, only our perception of it is, but I am struggling to make the next leap which seems to be; the Universe is not logical.
I see no reason why the universe should be logical, or obey laws, have constants etc, but would perhaps want to say as that’s the only meaningful way humans have of modelling, predicting it, it’s what we’re stuck with, in terms of interpretation.
2/ Connotations, agree. Unless an entirely logical language could be used, perhaps mathematics is the closest. I’m not a programmer, but I understand even programming languages can lead to self contradictions, multiple interpretations etc.
3/ From another post you talked of “Tian” part of Confuscianism (?), I can’t help wondering if this is represented by the ideogram 天, one pronounciation/reading is “ten” meaning sky or heaven in japanese, just curiousity….
@ Joseph
1) I am saying that people are not uniform, but I guess the larger point I am trying to make is that language and the logic derived from it are not representational. I would agree with you that once a definition is agreed upon, then perhaps X is X. However, I do not think that a definition is ever agreed upon.
First of all, as I stated in the last post I argue that what Peter calls “smuggling connotations” is a human reality. The idea of “smuggling connotations” is that more is conveyed to the listener than what the speaker intended. But if this were not the case language would not be language. What makes language is not signs but symbols. Signs are artefacts that try to be representational, or in other words, artefacts that point to as few meanings as possible. Take weather vane for example, a weather vane is designed to represent the direction and intensity of the wind. Weather vanes can also contain aesthetic meaning in their design, naturalistic meaning in the materials it was built from, and sentimental meaning depending on their relation to the viewer. In some sense this is still a plurality, however the potential meaning is greatly restrained. Anyone with proper cultural fluency would interpret a foreign weather vane as an indicator of wind speed and direction. Signs attempt to be representational, but it is still impossible to restrict the meaning they convey to a single relationship. Symbols on the other hand, are artefacts that contain a multitude of meaning. Take for example the word “love” the amount of things, experiences, times, places, and people that are attached to that word is impossible to quantify. It is also equally impossible to say what love represents. Love is not representational. Some people kill those they love out of love, whereas some people kill themselves out of love. Some people refrain from aide out of love ( believing they are helping those they love grow), whereas some people smother out of love (believing they are protecting those they love). You cannot truly define love, you cannot truly define justice, or truth, or God, etc. Symbols are not representational, and yet as humans we believe they are. And that is the power of symbols. When patriots see an American flag being burnt or abused they feel enraged because that flag is America, but it is not. I do not know if I am conveying this idea clearly. I would recommend looking up philosophers Richard Rorty or Charles Peirce. This idea is developed out of their work.
If you do not have the time for that, I guess the main thing I am trying to say is that language is not representational. Human logic is built off of language, therefore logic is not representational either. I will say again as I did above I am still pro-logic. And obviously I am pro-language. I see both these things as tools. The point of my writing is not to get you to discard your tools, but to rethink how you use them.
3) The character you wrote is Tian (天). It has been assimilated into the Japanese language, but is originally a Chinese character. Tian (pronounced Tee-en) does have the meaning of Sky as well as “heaven.” It also has a lot of other meanings. Tian as Heaven is different than the Western heaven. When Chinese people refer to Heaven as in the biblical place the word is 天堂 tian-tang. Chinese is really interesting ^_^ I am jealous that you are studying Japanese.
He he! The first thing you learn when studying Japanese is 90% of it is stolen (they tell me re-invented!)….reminds me of English. In fact, if you look at the Onyomi (best translation is probably “Chinese reading”) of a Japanese Ideogram (sometimes they have multiple readings) you can ascertain when the reading was introduced, and roughly which region….
Is Logic a Property of Knowledge?
This is actually correct, and not something I disagree with at all. In fact, you will find differences between one apple and another apple — perhaps one is slightly smaller, or slightly greener, or slightly younger. It’s a fallacy to say they are identical.
But this is not what I mean when I say “an apple is an apple” or “A is A”. This is what is called the Law of Identity which I show is derived from the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle in my essay “The Origin of Truth”.
I also further show that these two laws are derived from all of our experiences with identity, noting that we are incapable of imagining the world being any different. This is how logic is a property of a system — specifically a law dictating how knowledge will arrange, just as there are laws dictating how hurricanes will arrange.
Specifically, “A is A” means that you will never find an object that is not what it is, though it could not be what it appears to be. This is very similar to asserting “2 = 2″.
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Is Smuggling Connotations a Fallacy?
First of all, there is a difference between descriptive communication — how we currently communicate, and normative communication — how we should communicate. In the context of describing the world, we should communicate as clearly as possible, saying no more than that which we predict. (In the realms of literature, the goal of communication is obviously different.)
So it may be a fact that currently we describe the world with lots of smuggled connotations, but I think that we shouldn’t. Remember that a smuggled connotation is interpreting a statement to mean what it doesn’t actually mean — to go out of bounds of what is said; to derive an invalid conclusion from the stated premises.
Quite frequently, this happens when definitions are equivocated. In “Don’t Smuggle Your Connotations”, I give the example of Data, an android from Star Trek. Because we often have a smuggled connotation of “that which lives deserves respect”, we might be fooled into thinking that Data does not deserve our respect because he does not live. But this is a fallacy, because saying “A implies B” does not let us conclude that “not-A implies not-B”.
A similar fallacy is with the very statement “that which lives deserves respect”, mainly because there are things we consider alive that do not deserve our respect. That “respect” notion is thus a smuggled connotation that we should discard in order to make more accurate predictions.
So this means that a smuggled connotation is indeed a fallacy, an example of a conclusion that should not have been derived because it does not in fact follow from what we know.
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Is It Possible to Not Smuggle Connotations?
This is probably true, though I wouldn’t know for sure without doing far more research into communication. It is similar to the idea that it is likely not possible to act rationally all the time, as much as we would like to.
Some of it is just the general difficulty of bridging the gap of communication — saying what you want to say without being misinterpreted is already difficult enough. It’s harder on top of that to not only communicate perfectly, but to also have interpreted perfectly everything everyone else has said, and everything that you have discovered.
But, I think it is possible to communicate with far fewer smuggling connotations both on the sending end and receiving end, if both people are aware of going on. And that’s what I’m aiming for, nothing higher.
Fair enough. I agree that it is without a doubt beneficial to work to limit your connotations for the sake of some communication, but I still think other mediums of communication, like art, are so powerful and effective because the connotations are so open-ended. \
And personally, I would not use the fact that an individual can create symbolic absolutes (2=2), what I called absolute logic, as proof that there can be absolute truth. But that is just because of the network of ideas that I attach to my identity, so I guess I’ll have to let that one slide.
P.S I like how you say “this is actually correct” ^_^! I also like your essay about Mew and Ditto I just saw the other day. I was so shocked because when I was in 3rd grade I never figured out you could actually catch a real mew in Pokemon red or blue. I always got the glitch one or missingNo. I saw that, looked it up on youtube, and was like O_O
@joseph:
I’m not really sure what you are talking about, because each programming language is highly specific. The same program run on different machines will always, except in very unlikely and abnormal circumstances (henceforth known as “always”) produce the same output. This indicates a high degree of consistency and a focus on one interpretation.
A computer program cannot smuggle a connotation or understand an applause light, A computer program will always do precisely and exactly what you tell it to do. This requires you to know exactly and specifically what you want, because you can’t just say “implement freedom” — instead you must tell the computer what freedom is.
This is different between conversations between people, where “freedom” can be discussed even if all members of the conversation don’t actually know what they mean by freedom.
@Tom (more from earlier):
I’m noticing a serious irony in being unable to effectively communicate a theory about effective communication.
Are “Symbols” Smuggled Connotations?
A lot of this comes from the difference between a fact and a value. The two have a complicated relationship that probably deserves its own blog post (which will probably be written soon, given NaNoWriMo), but my basic conception is the distinction is the presence of emotion or not. Values involve emotional content, akin to “yay for freedom”, whereas facts do not, akin to “This is a lemur”.
Obviously, statements can, and often do, have both emotional and factual content — in fact, I don’t think there are any statements that are utterly devoid of one or the other. Perhaps this is some of what you are getting at.
So here what you call a symbol would be something with a high amount of emotional content, and a sign would be something with a high amount of factual content. Language that you communicate can be both emotive and factual, and here’s the important part: it is not a fallacy of smuggled communication to understand the emotive component from someone else’s speech.
Though there could be other reasons not to issue statements with high emotional content, because you enter into the territory of applause lights: words that seem to mean something but really do not. Applause lights don’t involve smuggled connotations — they’re instead more a problem of deception when employed intentionally, tricking people into thinking you’re saying something of substance.
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I don’t think there is any description of the world that is utterly impossible to quantify, though it may depend on what you count as a quantification. Love, for instance, can be studied both neurologically and sociologically.
And it’s definitely not impossible to say what love represents. “Love” either communicates a set of anticipatable experiences or it does not. If it does, we can say what love represents. If it does not, we can discard it for being an applause light; a word that does not refer to anything at all, utterly disconnected from reality. The very fact that you can *feel* love means that love is referring to some feeling.
Now, of course, talking about love, especially in the dry language of social science, will definitely not make you *feel* love. The act of describing and feeling are entirely different. I think this might provide some basis for why descriptions of love always feel inadequate, and an explanation for why this inadequacy is an illusion.
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This is a potential disagreement, because I feel the statement “Symbols are representational, and yet as humans we believe they are not”. People, especially when explaining how atheism is allegedly misguided, tell me that science can never explain love, that meaning cannot be reduced, or that purpose is not possible without God. People insist that words like “justice” are just devoid of definition — either something is just or it is not, and that’s it.
I disagree. I think words like “justice” do have definitions, or should, especially if we want to determine what is and is not just. For how can we make a determination if we have no criteria by which to judge?
At minimum, the symbol will represent all the emotions that we associate with it, and at best it will refer to a set of facts that we prefer to be true, and can aim for.
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Can We Agree to Definitions?
I think that it is possible to agree to a definition. What happens with communication is often a word gets confused. For instance, take the standard argument about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound: it does if sound means “acoustic vibration” and does not if sound means “sensory perception”.
Here, we needed a single reduction to reduce the confusion, because the words we reduced sound to are not as confusing; that is, it is much more likely that we will be anticipating the same experiences if we agree that a falling tree will make an acoustic vibration than if we agree that a falling tree will make a sound.
This is actually something that is potentially testable by science — we could see what people agree to, and then test if they are actually agreeing by verifying the experiences they anticipate, again studied either neurologically or sociologically through a variety of potential methods.
@Tom (reply to most recent comment):
Oh, definitely. Art is arguably entirely about smuggling connotations. You find meaning by interpreting the art how you see it.
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What is the difference between logic and truth? What do you mean by each? And what makes it so important for your identity?
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Haha, why?
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Yeah, my reaction exactly!
Actually implies that there was ever a question as to whether I was true ^_^
Logic to me is a human construction. I do not think that reality is logical. Truth is a reality external to the human mind, logic is not. That said, logic is an extremely useful tool for navigating reality. What I am arguing is that because logic navigates reality-rather than define it- it is not the sole tool of navigation. It is a good tool, but there are instances where there are other tools that are better. My point is one of moderation. Most people would probably benefit greatly from your essays because they would moderate their illogicality. However, you, the bloggers you subscribe to, and in my opinion a lot of the people you draw in are not most people. I think you make up that minority that is already logical enough and to the contrary needs to work on accepting other mediums for interpreting reality.
Can you expand on this?
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So truth is what logic aims to get at. Got it.
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Can you give me some examples of these situations?
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I am hoping to reach the population that needs to moderate their illogicality, though. They’re the intended audience.
@Peter Hurford
I, perhaps falsely, believe/believed that if was possible to produce ambiguous programming through…uncareful use of whatever the equivalent of grammar is…i thought that was one reason why software conflicts occur, and computers crash?
It is far from my area of expertise, I may well be wrong.
This kind of thing:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_grammar
@Joseph:
I didn’t know ambiguous grammars existed, so thanks for pointing that out. I guess I was wrong. But I still think the greater point applies because:
1. There are some programming languages without ambiguous grammars, so we could theoretically appeal to those. We would only be hosed if it was demonstrated that an unambiguous grammar is impossible.
2. Even if the computer encounters an ambiguous grammar, it still flags it, which is what I argue we should try to do in our communications. In human-to-human conversations, we often accept the ambiguity, or interpret it in a way that is fallacious (as in, that interpretation does not logically follow from what was said).
What I am arguing is that because logic navigates reality-rather than define it- it is not the sole tool of navigation. It is a good tool, but there are instances where there are other tools that are better.
Can you give me some examples of these situations?
Einstein says that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But I would argue that even if you do the same thing, the fact that you have done it before makes it slightly different than the first time you did it. The fact that you have done something 3 times makes it different than the second time and so on. The differences between time 1-X might be negligible but I believe things have emergent thresholds, a point where doing the same thing over and over produces drastically different results. Einstein’s quote and in my opinion rational thinking deny the possibility of emergent thresholds. Logic says “A is A” and it will always be A, but I believe that from the constitution of A can emerge things separate from that constitution.
For example, I started running about a year ago now. The first two months I ran it felt like hell. i ran once a day for two months. I did the same thing over 60 times expecting different results. I did not know when that emergent threshold was, but I was willing to wait for it. And it came around the 70th time. You can argue that each time was different, but that is true for anything we talk about. The point is that your Truth-Apts and Einstein’s logic are based on a principle that you can accurately predict reality based on past experiences. If you were to do something and derive a result you should use that to predict that the next time you did the same thing you would derive the same result. The more times you reach the same result the more you should expect the same thing to happen in similar situations. However the principle of emergent thresholds is that at some unpredictable point “A” will cease to be A. At some point running became incredibly pleasurable, changed how I thought, the constitution of my body, and who knows what else.
I believe any action follows this principle of emergentism. Therefore, even if doing something continues to reap the same unsatisfactory results I do not think it is insanity to continue doing it, it is ritual. Of course this idea can be misused just as logic can. Just because things have emergent qualities does not mean they are good qualities. Furthermore, some actions are socially, psychologically, or physically damaging. Depending on the degree of damage the potential emergent thresholds of such actions are not worth exploration.
I think a lot of people use logic to opt out of actions or paths that still have unknown emergent thresholds. They think themselves out of action. I also think people use logic to give up on other people, ride them off as an “A” or a “B” instead of an unknown.
To me, these people seem to be reasoning incorrectly, so the solution would be to reason correctly, not use something different than reason.
I’m not exactly sure what you expect logic to disagree with in what you are doing.
Is there a difference between reason and logic to you?
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I think this quote, taken as literally stated, is actually incorrect and not an example of what logic would “say”, since there are clearly instances where people have achieved different results from doing the same thing over and over again. Your point that it is probably impossible to do the same thing twice is also well taken.
What I think perhaps this quote is saying is that it is unlikely for you to achieve success if you don’t think critically about why you failed and what you can do to improve, but rather just having an unjustified hope that maybe things will be different this time do to outside circumstances. A bet on luck is not as good as a strategic play in most cases.
Sidenote: This quote was actually said by Rita Mae Brown, and is misattributed to Einstein by many.
Yes, to me there is a difference between logic and reason. I see reason as having intentionality in action; whereas I see logic as a specific type of reasoning.
So, if we were to adopt common definitions, what is it that you think we would disagree about?
It depends. Would you agree that in times you need non-logical reasoning ?
I don’t know what you mean by non-logical reasoning.
When I say non-logical reasoning, I mean reasoning that leads you to incorrect results (predictions about reality that do not actually obtain). I see no reason to ever intentionally do this, nor am I sure you really can deceive yourself in such a way.