Should Reason, Rationality and Logic Be the End all Be all?

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the treatment of women on wrongplanet

StarvingArtist and Dox

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt259526.html


Global capitalism has written off the human race

Adb and I

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf252502-0-15.html


Why I fail to take most of feminism seriously!

Dox and Nights_Like_These

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt259302.html

There are certain assumptions that have been made by certain members and these are just two examples. I got into a debate with Adb and he was looking at things through pure rationality and pure economics. Dox got into a debate with StarvingArtist and Nights_Like_These.

A certain theme came up that has led me to question certain assumptions that some members are laboring under. The theme Logic, Rationality, and Reason should be the absolute sole governors as to how to live our lives and how to interact with each other on both the micro and macro levels.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. These are my interpretations and if I'm wrong in the interpretations please show me so my reasoning can be more sound.

Both StarvingArtist and Nights_Like_These and other women on here were offended, slighted and hurt by the sexism and misogyny that may or may not be going on around wrongplanet. I believe there has been some going on. Dox's objection was that there was no empirical evidence and there was no logic basis for implementation of the policing of the sexism in the Love and Dating sub-forum.

Dox was trying to look at things in this rational, objective and logical manner. Nights_Like_These was trying to get Dox to understand how she felt and that certain things were subjective and I have to agree with Nights_Like_These based upon my own experiences.

I was trying to get Adb to look at things in a wider context. He was trying to factor out ethics and morality when it came to economics and science. To me things have to be interrelated as a whole. In a science experiment and business one has to factor in morality and ethics in addition to economics.

I believe all of this is a microcosm of what happens globally.

Should logic, rationality, and reason be the sole way we interact and deal with each other or is logic, rationality and reason just one part of the tapestry of human understanding that interrelates together in a complex web? Should empathy and emotion be interrelated to rationality. Is it possible for one to be absolutely objective and should one always be objective? Should emotional processing, ethics, empathy be factored rationality on how we relate to each other and how we live our lives not just on wrongplanet but as an inter-connected global village and society?

Should we treat things as one interrelated whole in a gigantic web in which the strands inter-connect with each other instead of separate, distinct and disparate components?

I believe the answer is yes if we're to develop a better society that we all can truthfully live in and live our lives with virtue, logic and understanding.

How shall we all then live?

The people who clam to be totally logical and unbiased usually aren't. Usually it's just a high horse that people put themselves on and a way of saying "I'm right and you're wrong". "Be rational" and "you're just being emotional" are ways of undermining other people. The whole rational and logical thing is total bs. There isn't a functioning person on this planet that is devoid of emotion and bias.

Indeed.

It is impossible to do something without a motivating sentiment. However logical one may consider their actions, they are moved by an initial, and often intermediary, sentiment.

The kind of person who is deemed - or who cares to be deemed - 'logical' or 'rational' is usually someone not given to considering the negative effects of their actions on others. To allow them to be called (by themselves or others) more 'rational' or 'logical' is in some way to say they have the better ideas, that if it weren't for this pesky giving a damn about others we could be more like them - rational/logical being considered good things, and certainly better than irrational/illogical.

What it usually signals is that someone is really quite in love with their theory, which they find to be 'rational' or 'logical', and so they think it should be introduced, regardless of its effect on those pesky people. Said theory often display some semblance of logic or reason, in so far as that, if one accepts certain premises, the conclusion follows, so the smitten theorist can proclaim their theory 'logical' with some justification, and anyone who opposes deemed anti- or il- logical.

There is no scientific way of determining whether a rational argument is normatively "better" than an irrational one.

At best, rationality can provide insight in the case of an "IF" scenario.

IF you want to achieve X, then Y will be the most rational way to accomplish it, while Z will be counter-productive.

... where X can be "Bake a cake/Live a long life/Get lots of hits on YouTube/Build a sturdy bridge/Kill and dismember your neighbour/Send an astronaut to the Moon/" etc.

The primary reason for adopting a rational mindset is that "it works", but this is self-referential...

Rationality isn't the problem. It's the capacity a person has to actually use it that ultimately comes into question.

Yes, in the end everything boils down to logic. Human logic, however, is bounded by human understanding. Dent has said he doesn't understand why Christians persist in their beliefs despite apparent evidence from textual criticism that we're wrong. The issue is that Christians are themselves living proof of what they believe. Until someone can see that or experience it for themselves, all they have are the assumptions they make regarding liberally biased textual criticism (incidentally, there is nothing wrong with textual criticism if we are looking for accuracy in the text itself. It's important to know where additions, omissions, and corruptions are. But certain "scholars" refuse to stop there, and that's where we run into problems).

If your basic assumption is "no God," then that will largely decide how you approach arguments against God--and many of those would have logical conclusions if you look at it in a purely mathematically logical kind of way. But if your basic assumption is "+God," you will find perfectly mathematically logical conclusions that support "+God."

The real problem is the dichotomy between one side and the opposite side, and I'm not just talking about theistic arguments here. Some arguments, like the theistic argument, have conclusions that are either absolutely true or absolutely false, i.e. there either IS a God or there isn't. Which conclusion is the correct one, and why do you choose the particular path to rationality you use?

just wanted to let you know that nights_like_these is in fact male.

other than that, i agree with hopper's take on this issue: there is a great blind spot in one's human perception if one's only analytical lens is "logic/rationality".

Please don't try and psychoanalyze me, it's insulting and annoying.

That being said, I'll humor you a little bit.

Logic, reason, and rationality are not the sole governors of how we live, I've never said they should be and it's a mischaracterization of me to say that I have. What I do say and believe is that when it comes to debating matters of fact, they are the most valid and objective system we have for determining truth and pitting ideas against one another, and are certainly superior to the emotional arguments that are so often brought to bear by people not familiar with them. I'd compare them to science vs faith, with one system using a rigorous system of proofs to arrive at a conclusion based on the evidence, and the other simply stating a pre-existing belief and then possibly trying to collect facts that support that belief. None of this is to say that people should live their lives according to science, I certainly don't, or that logic is a foolproof system for decision making, which it clearly isn't in light of the fact that most people are not logical and thus are not predictable, but rather, than logic is a superior way to arrive at the truth than is emotion. This is why we have scientists and not faith inventors, and why lawyers deal in facts and not feelings.

I you were to study the patterns of my posting on WP, what you would see is a consistent effort to force people to think, whether it's by presenting partisans with information that contradicts their biases, playing devil's advocate with people angrily raging about things that they are clearly responsible for themselves, pointing out when people are assuming facts not actually in evidence, or my favorite, confronting hypocrites with their own posts behaving in the manner that they're currently complaining about. Clearly, this has not endeared me to the subset of WP posters who prefers not to look too critically into their own deeply held beliefs, but I'm okay with that.

Just for fun.