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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (17473)	6/29/2001 12:27:16 AM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

it mainly reflects a preference for principles and beliefs derived from thought over those derived from pure belief in what one has been told. The fallacy with that, of course, is that your thought has to be based on pure beliefs. Decartes notwithstanding, you have to start thinking somewhere and from something. And that must be a belief, an assumption, a postulate, because at bottom of all thought are things that can't be proved by thought, but must be purely believed. In fact, belief in the validity of thought is itself a core belief, unprovable by thought. It's just a matter of where you get your core beliefs from, not whether you have them. Some people get their beliefs from religious teaching and literature, others don't. But there's no way to prove which sets of belief are more "true." It's like definitions. Logical thought requires language, and language requires definition, and definitions must be assumed and adoped by agreement, they can never be proved. So it's simply a fallacy to say that your preference is for principles and belief derived from thought as though you didn't start with unprovable beliefs just the way anybody else does.