Yes, that is precisely what I mean. One must first have an intuitive judgment before it can be expressed and acted upon through logic. For logic itself cannot produce this judgment. In the trolley problem, logic can only deduce what the outcomes will be; which action is correct is not a judgment that logic can make.
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Hmm.
The Tram Problem, in its original form, did exactly what you want - showing the inadequacy of algorithmic methods in Ethics. But it didn’t just speculate, or dogmatically assert; it set up an example for you personally to consider, and set out the consequences. Analytic philosophy doesn’t work in the way you suggest.
Banno’s Law: It’s always easier to critique something if you start by misunderstanding it.
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You might think that only when logical cognition goes deep enough can it yield genuine knowing. But the flaw in this way of thinking is: can logic itself even determine what counts as “enough”?Whether something is “enough” is not a judgment that logic can make. Behind it still lies an intuitive judgment.
Logic is merely a cognitive tool of human beings; it does not determine the “why.” Take the meteorite that fell from the sky and ultimately wiped out the dinosaurs. Through logical cognition, we can arrive at a causal relation: the meteorite caused the dinosaurs’ extinction. Yet the question of why that meteorite appeared at all is one logic cannot answer.
In truth, the law of causality works only because, before any logical deduction begins, we have already posited a cause or an effect. Only then can deduction proceed, and only then does a causal cognition take shape in our minds. “Because of the meteorite, the dinosaurs went extinct” — this is us, in our cognition, handing logic a cause (the meteorite) and an effect (the dinosaurs’ extinction) and telling it to bind them together. Logic merely works backward from the extinction to infer that the meteorite was the cause. As for where the meteorite itself came from, or whether there is some deeper cause behind it, logic has no explanation to offer. And the reason is simple: our intuition has not given us the relevant result.
No. That’s very far from what I think.
Suppose our intuition supplies a cause: God dropped the meteorite. At that moment, the logic clicks into place. God made the meteorite fall, and the meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs. The causal chain then becomes: God caused the dinosaurs’ extinction. Yet before the intuition of “God” ever entered the picture, human logic could never have deduced this causal relation on its own.
Then I honestly can’t grasp what you’re getting at.
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Philosophy is the western scholastic invention in its origin, and it is analytic in nature.
The most basic form of philosophy starts by asking “what is X”. You cannot answer the question without being analytic.
What appears as non western philosophies are actually religions and citizens ethics to educate their followers, students and citizens under the name / guise of philosophy.
So, if one does philosophy, then he/she cannot avoid being analytic. Denying the fact would be denying philosophy.
I don’t follow why an intuition is required to supply a cause. A meteor can fall and land on a dinosaur and I’d say “that meteor caused the death of the dinosaur.” Do you think I intuited the cause and effect or just saw it?
I get the Hume argument there (questioning causation itself), but you seem to be saying it matters if we posit God as the cause as opposed to positing the meteor as the cause and that that reveals a deficiency in analytical reasoning
If you are distinguishing intuitions from empirical evidence, that just strikes me as different epistemological standards (empiricism versus intuition), not any limit of analytical philosophy.
I also don’t see your example necessarily holding because some may anchor their belief in God from empirical facts.
Are or you just saying that a logically accurate syllogism is only pragmatically applicable to the extent its premises are factually accurate? I’d think that obvious.
I think you just described a hinge proposition. The concept of a hinge fits very easily into the analytic mood because it acts as a dead end.
Just to add to your ramble, as I’ve been reading about Bradley, a couple of historians make the same observation, that British Idealism was part of the general mood of Britain at the time. Whatever that was, the transition to analytic philosophy was part of a dark turn brought on by a demoralizing war. I haven’t quite fathomed how that works, though.
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You think you saw the meteor, and you think you saw the dinosaurs — both are facts of human experience. But your seeing did not, on its own, smoothly forge a logical connection between those two facts. What actually forges that connection is your intuition itself.
Take this: why is it that when I see someone drink some water and then eat a biscuit, I don’t link the two actions as cause and effect? It’s not because drinking water caused the biscuit-eating. Do you see the difference?
The very ability to build a causal logic is the work of your mind’s processing — it is not a logical link that the phenomena themselves establish on their own.
As you pointed out, a logical structure is only responsible for derivation. It doesn’t determine truth or falsity. And it’s precisely in the things that seem self-evident that you get fooled.
For example, someone says: “If you won’t give up your seat for me, you’re a bad person.” To the person speaking, the logic seems perfectly derivable, and they can firmly believe it is correct. Yet most people probably wouldn’t accept their logic.
Why do different people have such different cognitions of the same event? Because logic is only responsible for derivation — it doesn’t care about right and wrong.
Human empirical cognition is not, in any real sense, made up only of “correct” experiences. Because “correctness” itself is something judged by human intuition.
“Hinge” is exactly the right word. And a hinge is all it is — intuition snaps “God” into place, the door of logic swings shut, and the whole thing feels “clear.” In reality, you’ve just walked into a dead end.
And that proves the point: logic is never the one who decides whether this hinge should be installed. It only cares whether, once the door is shut, everything pushes through smoothly.
The dead end only holds because your intuition and mine both tacitly equate “the logic is clear” with “this is the truth.” But logic only handles derivation. It doesn’t judge right and wrong.
I agree. I’ve had this thought that rationality is fundamentally about self preservation. In the face of an unknown threat, your best bet is to remain calm and think things through rationally. That’s what Jackie Chan does. He’s calm and he looks around his environment for tools for his survival.
Rational logical analysis is indeed useful. It’s like using chopsticks to eat — chopsticks are genuinely useful. But you can’t say that without chopsticks, I’d have no way to eat. Reason and logic have their place, but human beings do not exist by them alone.
We ought to acknowledge where reason and logic are useful — not canonize them into the measure of all things. Do that, and you simply have no way to account for human feeling and sensibility at all.
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I acknowledged the Humean argument suggesting you can’t know causation, but only can observe consistent connections.
That has to do with physical causation.
You then switch to denying causation when it comes to motives or explanation. We typically refer to human motivated conduct as reasons as opposed to causes.
If you’re now arguing reasons are causes, then your theory expands.
But to the question whether I can know you eat breakfast because you are hungry, I can know that because you told me, because I’ve seen such before, or all sorts of reasons. I don’t designate my basis as “intuition” if I have specific reasons for concluding. I appreciate I can be wrong about anything, perception, rationality, intuition, or otherwise.
But if this is just an argument for some level of skepticism and that our perceptions are part of a complex neurological process with built in assumptions, I agree with that.
That that suggests I don’t know why you’re eating breakfast, I don’t agree.
You’re right that human experience can serve as a standard for judgment. But what you may not have noticed is this: why should experience hold up in the first place? What is it that decides, for you, that experience is correct?
For experience to count as a correct judgment, something beyond experience is already required — an intuition that transcends experience. Otherwise, give you a thousand identical experiences and you still couldn’t forge the link between that experience and “correct.”
It isn’t the repeated experience that makes us form the notion of “correct.” It’s that there’s already an intuition in us doing the judging — and that repeated experience is what we then call “correct.”
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What, I wonder, is the “flair of philosophy”? Is it a flair FOR something? Like the dramatic, perhaps? Or a kind of style? Does analytic philosophy lack philisophy’s characteristic jauntiness, or savoir-faire or derring do? It’s saucy, coy approach to ethical, epistemological and metaphysical questions?
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Only in AP will you find a philosopher who is proud of the fact that he isn’t actually saying anything.