Mark Waser said:
Rationality and irrationality are interesting subjects . . . .
Many people who endlessly tout "rationally" use it as an exact synonym for
logical correctness and then argue not only that irrational then means
"logically incorrect" and therefore wrong but that anything that can't be
proved is irrational.
Personally, I believe that we need to consciously have the same three forms
of rational that we have for moral:
rational - logically provable and correct
irrational - logically provable as incorrect
arational - not logically provable
Irrational is a bad idea -- but there is a huge swath of stuff that is
currently being defined as irrational that is actually arational.
Logic is not as universally applicable as it's adherents would have you
believe. Where it *can* be used, it is king -- but far, far too many people
use "logic" to prove things where a single additional factor can easily
render all of their precious arguments visibly incorrect. These are not
logical arguments and this is exactly what Omohundro is doing. As I said in
a previous e-mail, extrapolation is not logic (except in the very rare case
of inductive proofs -- which *require* closed systems).
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This is pretty much how I feel about the subject as well. When you try to use
"logical" methods on an inductive (open and non-monotonic data space) the
logical or rational methods will act more like heuristics at best. And a great
deal of knowledge is based on partial knowledge or on conjectures about the
data environment (or subject matter). However, I still feel that advantageous
to use logic and other rational methods to examine concepts within the fluid
boundaries that we can construct around them.
I think that our thinking is comprised of mixtures of rational and non-rational
reasoning. This means that they can be examined using rational analysis even
though they are not purely rational.
Jim Bromer
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agi
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