Presupositionalism gives us a basis for logic, right? The basis it gives us is the Christian God. Therefore, the Christian God justifies logic. However, the proof that presupositionalist use for the Christian God is the transcendental argument: What must exist for logic (morality, etc) to exist? Well, the Christian God must exist. But you've just engaged in circular reasoning. You're using logic to justify the Christian God, but you're also justifying logic with the Christian God. Therefore, you haven't justified anything. Any attempt to justify logic must use logic. You cannot have justification without logic, because logic is the means of justification. Logic, therefore, must be assumed without justification. And therefore presupostionalism fails.

@@bobbilderson8556 Circularity is bound to happen in a paradigmatic level argument.

+DevinBigSeven First off, since your comment has so many returns in it, it reads like a poem, and it is very interesting if looked at aesthetically instead of for its content, but I digress. To your actual comment, there are many different logics which disagree on what statements are true, in large part because of Godel's Incompleteness theorems which cause problems for basically any logical system, as well as other argumetns which claim that there are various problems with classical logic. So yes, there are systems which disagree on what is valid and what is not. In terms of growing vs changing, I think that there is an argument that as a logics system growing is effectively changing. adding one postulate changes non-euclidean geometry to euclidean geometry. The system may only be growing, but is is modeling a very different domain. Either way, it seems to me that there is a good case that logic is jsut a tool that we use which can change, not some unalterable thing.

Thanks for the reply. The returns were due to my Chromebook only showing one line at a time and not wrapping when typing in the comment but instead shifting to the right when the text overflowed the comment box.

+Yellow Jacket But the whole of logic includes many axioms, and even if many logics have used the LEM, not all of them have, and they have all included different other axioms in addition. The whole of logic as in the propositions that we can prove and not prove has changed constantly. Certain rules may ahve stayed the same over some systems, but that does not mean that the whole of logic has not changed, or tht those rules are the correct logic.

The idea of one logic being correct or that the rules of logic cannot change is quite interesting! It's similar to the idea that English is the correct language and the rules of English cannot change. We're taught how to speak English as children and the rules are declared to us authoritatively, so it's easy to imagine that those rules are carved in stone and binding rather than just the arbitrary choices of the people who shaped the language. It's true that if you invent your own strange dialect of English then no one will understand what you're trying to say, but aside from that there's nothing wrong with doing it. If your dialect becomes popular then maybe it will become the new standard for English. The same works for inventing new rules of logic and popularizing them. If we want logic that defies the law of excluded middle then we can have it. We just need to decide what it means for a proposition to be neither true nor false. If people like our new logic and start using it, then the law of excluded middle can be resigned to history books as no longer relevant to the logic people are using.

"We're taught how to speak English as children and the rules are declared to us authoritatively, so it's easy to imagine that those rules are carved in stone and binding rather than just the arbitrary choices of the people who shaped the language" No it isn't. It's not analogous at all. I could start making a new language right now if I wanted to, and I can imagine how it would work fine. I can't even think in a different logic, and neither can you. If I had to give up the laws of logic I accept now and start over, there would be nothing I could do. I wouldn't be able to make sense of anything.

"If I had to give up the laws of logic I accept now and start over, there would be nothing I could do. I wouldn't be able to make sense of anything." It's really not hard. People don't actually give up the conventional rules of logic, but people do often invent and learn new logics with different rules. For example, consider paraconsistent logics and fuzzy logics. Try it and see how easy it is. The fact that people use non-classical logics shows that if we wanted we could abandon classical logic entirely. The only thing keeping us tied to classical logic is that it is what everyone knows.

Never mind, I remember you.

Thanks!

but maybe the potential of something to be a weapon is captured by what i meant by ‘loose’, and if you dont like that then maybe you could tighten the description? what if i just further specified that for something to become a weapon you need to exert 0-X amount of energy in modifying/realising it, and X can be like the energy only possible with ‘above average ability’ and to work out average ability just refer yourself to what most people’s abilities are like (and the energy business can just be a methodological problem)? or maybe my weapons aren’t the result of realising a potential, or maybe, to go back to the loose version, ‘weapon’ is whatever you do to achieve human goal Y indeed i dont regard my weapon example as reflecting something intrinsic, i mentioned it existing as a description (maybe this is like saying god does exist - as a fictional character), and my description did/does actually account for ‘how people use it’ ie violently etc the point i was making is what you demonstrated when you began to talk about weapons at all using language. relative to language’s own changing criteria, language can be intelligible/coherent, and it’s flexible too - maybe circular and internally consistent have no difference. eg one may claim that not everything can be classified, but ‘that which purportedly cannot be classified’ is a classification. if you’re sufficiently creative then maybe you can avoid all worded problems, maybe you just outright redefine an entire concept, make or collapse a distinction, delete something, etc. in which case, the above changes i made to my weapon example are not so much ad hoc manoeuvres as they are a demonstration of the non-intrinsic/non-fixed/non-necessary/arbitrary/etc but adaptable/usable and therefore meaningful nature of language so basically language vs intrinsic. they seem different to me. depends how you define things. correct me if im incorrect / give me better definitions

+nobody An interesting objection. I agree that the weapon analogy is very rough, but I think that the idea is that weapons are a tool, there is no true form of weapon, regardless of your definition of weapon, there is not some correct or perfect weapon. There may be weapons which are more or less effective at achieving their purpose, just as there are some logics which are more or less effective, but I have yet to see proof that there is some true form of logic, especially in light of Godels inocmpleteness, and other paradoxes.

i agree with you, but in the way a technical agnostic acts like an atheist for practicality i dont regard language as trivial, i see it as a self appointed god (god at least exists as some sort of character) that encompasses (along with its infused emotions/instincts) high order thinking you said ‘there is no true form of weapon, regardless of your definition of weapon’ - are you implying that truth can/only exist outside of definition/language? because if so, we would not be able to entertain at all or fully entertain ‘truth’, or at least we would not be able to verify it im saying that true/false is a function of language and that some words/ideas act as slang for the extra-language hypothetical (note im using the word ‘language’ loosely for now) so ironically(?) ‘true logic’ and the idea of extra-language truth (sorry if you didnt imply this) are both examples of unverifiables (gods, teapots, etc)

This is one of many series that I started an have yet to finish, but that does not mean it won't ever be finished, there are just so many videos that I want to make! :)

@@CarneadesOfCyrene I love them all. They're honestly my one of my main go to's for philosophy. Thank you.

To claim that this is an argument from Aristotle may be a stretch. Rather it is an argument from the point of view from Aristotle looking into the future and seeing how unrecognizable what we call logic is from what he called logic, and realizing that it is a set of tools, not objective rules that he wrote down.

+krzyszwojciech But there are many people that dispute even the core tenents of logic, since those very axioms give rise to some of the most pervasive paradoxes like the paradox of the liar. Some tools may not have changed, but some theories have moved on without them.

Oh, they may be disputed, but have anything serious come out of it, like really? I'm not so sure (but what do I know? I have not studied any of it on a serious level, though I plan to). Traditional logic does seem a bit rigid as it operates on absolutes, so its usefulness may be limited due to our own epistemological limitations, troubles with creating correct definitions (based on our limited understanding of any phenomenon) etc. Some logics could be pure constructs. Maybe some deontic "ought to" is just a subjective illusion (which technically still does exist, though individually). Maybe fuzzy logic is in principle reducible to classical logic (while casting shadow on our poor, fuzzy definitions), it just wouldn't be necessarily always practical to go along with such reduction. Maybe classical logic is the underlying logic. I'm not sure. I'll get back to you on that in a few years, if I'm still alive ;) As for the Liar paradox, it isn't necessarily something that should cast doubt on logic. I'm in no way an expert, but... let's start from the fact that classical logic operates on sentences to which values True or False CAN be ascribed in the first place. Since you cannot place any value onto that paradoxical statement and keep it consistent, then classical logic doesn't apply to it and we should seriously consider the possibility of it simply being a nonsensical sentence. It definitely sounds like nonsense. Coincidence? I don't think so. There may be many types of nonsense, accumulating different kinds of linguistic errors. It could be a science of its own (wouldn't be surprised if it already is). Closer look at the liar paradox may also reveal that the sentence mixes language and metalanguage - so it may be a hint that we can discover and specify additional constraints propositional sentences should comply with to make sense and for the traditional logic to be able to operate on them.

+Jane Black Exactly. Math has changed in huge ways (we used to not have zero), and there are changes in formal logic constantly. The claim that there is something deeper which we are discovering instead of simply tools that we are using to understand the world, is the very thing which is being debated. Langauge is certainly ambiguous, but even formal systems change over time.

It reminds me of "Do numbers EXIST?" You can count objects. You can see some ink on a piece of paper in the shape of what we call a number. But what is the concept of a number? If existence implies a physical presence, then no, there are no such things as numbers. But they are bound to physical reality by some critters who for some reason are interested in predicting how many nuts they can save for winter. And then there's the theoretical mathematicians. How much of mathematics is for its own sake, and how much of it is seen as a method to predict and manipulate our surroundings? Would there be such a thing as mathematics without us to use it? If a tree has five apples, and one falls off and hits an Englishman on the head, it is a simple fact that there are "four" apples remaining on the tree. An apple falling to the ground can happen "four" more times. "Four" people can pick an apple off the tree and have lunch. Maybe another race or species would think of "four" as a set, or a set of sets. "Billy, Bob, Suzy, and Jenny can get an apple" or "Billy, Bob, Suzy and either Joe or Roy can get one." Does this change what the concept of "four" means, or the operations that can be done on it? Someone with a greater understanding of math can swoop in and appear like a wizard to less knowledgable folks, being able to solve problems that are hopeless to them. But is the wizard inventing a new machination, or accessing what was already there? There's no system you can invent in which more than four people can get an apple off the tree, and there's no way you can stop a fourth person from seeing that there's an apple on the tree if you tell them that only three people can get one. Mathematics being bounded by physical reality in this way lends me to think that it's a discovery, not an invention. However we play with it in our heads, it represents something objectively real.

+siamiam Thanks!

+quleughy A good idea. And some of the ideas here might connect to Godel in the sense that his incompleteness theorems are a good argumetn for the claim that there is not correct logic.

Wasn't Godel's theorem about self-consistency, but inability to prove all sentences? If so, it wouldn't be an argument against the existence of correct logic, at most an argument that it cannot be proven that it is.

But what makes a logic which is more efficient more true or correct? It is only our preference for certain kinds of systems which makes us search for a system which is "complete" or "consistent". Even if we were to find some system of logic which does all the things that we want it to do, what would make the the "right" or "true" logic? Any more than Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry is true.

It's truer in the sense that more truth can be derived from its use than from the logic we use at present. There are truths we think are only knowable a posteriori, but a perfect logic could derive all truths a priori. It may even derive truths we do not know yet. I do not think that we as flawed human beings or anything we could create in this universe will ever reach this perfect logic.

Seth Apex Oh cool. I believe I see you around Theists vids is that correct?

That's quite likely, as I do frequent theist youtube often. Hard not to when you're a Christian traditionalist.

Seth Apex Sweet. I think Mr. Spark is a channel I've seen you on. While not religious in a sense I do frequent Atheist and Theist content in order to see the arguments from both sides