A Basic Defense of Basic Logical Principles
I’ve been working hard during the last two weeks or so of my undergraduate career and have mostly been posting essays rather than ‘normal posts.’ I feel that this is a good change and will allow readers to interact with my work, provide valuable feedback, and might provoke some good discussion. The tentative title of my philosophy capstone paper is “Faith is no Virtue.”
I argue that faith, belief without evidence, is unjustified and not harmonious with reason.
In this paper, the main issues I discuss are:
- why holding justified true beliefs is important
- criteria for adequacy that can help distinguish truth value between competing hypotheses so that we can establish what hypothesis best accounts for the evidence
- how basic elements of reasoning, [modus ponens, modus tollens, induction, non-contradiction, respect for evidence, belief that the world exists, belief in other persons, trust in our sense, etc] which I collectively call (or will call) first principles, can be justified and immune from question-begging and infinite regress objections [you use logic to prove logic/well, what justifies that justification…]
- expert opinion and other appeals (both fallacious and not) to authority
- Why ‘faith’ in first principles doesn’t justify any ol’ faith in other beliefs (God exists, primarily)
I’m going to post bits and pieces of my essay as a ‘series’ instead of posting the entire essay on my blog at once. If you just can’t contain yourself, feel free to look at the whole essay in all of its prototype glory. It’s quite difficult, unfortunately, to find typos and other small errors…they keep appearing! I feel that this will allow for more centered discussion and will allow me to reorganize the essay and focus on specific sections at a time.
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