Channelknight Fadran

There's a weird hole in Philosophy that I've been thinking about.

(Note: I'm mostly going to be referring to the history of Western Philosophy throughout this because that's the bit I know about. Feel free to educate me about whatever whack breakthroughs that I'm sure the muslims and hindus were up to at the time)

Aeoliae was the one who brought up the "poll for results" thing in the Academy thread I made, which I dismissed because... well, that isn't particularly Philosophical in nature. Which is to say that Philosophy is concerned entirely with logic and reason (or "rhetoric," for you fancy folks), which is because it actually used to be the same thing as Science way back when - Science was the Philosophy of Nature, and what we call philosophy nowadays was essentially the Philosophy of Ethics and other stuff like that.

You can poll massive groups of people about the most obscure and complicated aspects of quantum physics and find a tasty bell curve with the data, but that isn't sufficient proof to publish a dissertation. For Science, direct observation and recording of natural phenomena is strictly required - however, Philosophy has this weird thing where you can't exactly "test" it, because it's not like you can get a Bottle of Ethics from PlatoMart and scrutinize it under a microscope. We don't really need to, because our day-to-day lives are ultimately unaffected by whatever metaphysical hijinks we can come up with... but still.

Eventually Science and Philosophy split into two separate things as this divide became clear - right around the renaissance-ish. Physical science was getting better and better with the advent of stuff like telescopes and coffee, with people beginning to pin down the natural world to mathematical equations and physical laws. Less so for Philosophy, which remained still very much untestable and unresolvable.

You might be wondering how something would manage to stick around if it's so fundamentally unprovable, and the answer is - of course - the Christians. Theology made a major comeback into western Philosophy (it had been around during the early days of Greek thinkers, and while it was still around it wasn't quite as prominent since Socrates), mainly in the form of one Thomas Aquinas: my Philosophy Teacher's favorite person ever. He (Aquinas, not my teacher) is notable for deconstructing the ideas of current Christian faith, scrutinizing them, then mostly reconstructing them using the power of reason, postulating that the natural human morality matches that described in the Christian faith (which is also mostly true for most religions that have a decent amount of "be good and do good things" in their doctrine). He also postulated that it is impossible for mortals to fully comprehend the Truth, and (as a Christian himself) presumed that revelation is still necessary to determine the nature of reality.

So by now you might be seeing a slight issue: to this day, western Philosophy is still very much influenced by christian values. Basically, it's European as hell. Philosophers never really claim to have the by-all and end-all of Truth in their theories (except maybe Nietzsche, depending on what his mood is), but it's important to note that we're limited beings with a limited capacity for reason, which means that for such things as Philosophy, we kind of have to take everything that people postulate with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, coming up with theories about the nature of the universe doesn't prove anything, and we'll probably wind up going about our daily lives regardless - and most Philosophers were well aware of this, because a lot of them were scientists and teachers on the side, with the theories of metaphysics and stuff like that acting as more of a hobby than a career.

It stands to reason that if a person's Philosophy can be wrong, then multiple people can have directly opposing Philosophies. This, in case you weren't aware, is called an opinion. Losers just scream at each other about why they're right and the other guy's wrong, but Philosophers are cool and have a nice long chat over some coffee and math homework about what is logical and what is not. Debates and arguments nowadays are notable for using stuff like "logos" and "ethos" and "pathos" and stuff to support either side's opinion, which is good and (usually) respectful, but with Philosophy it is all rationalizing. Philosophical debates are just equations (a word whose origins, by the way, literally just mean "to reconcile.")

You guys might've heard of William of Ockham and his somewhat infamously omnipresent Razor. People tend to misinterpret this theory as "the simplest solution is the often the correct one," but not only did he (probably) never say that, but enough people have just gone with it so far that it's become both a self-fulfilling prophecy and an absolute unit of a pretentious phrase. What he did write was "Plurality must never be posited without necessity," which is code for "if you need to invent fifty new rules to explain something you just came up with, then it's probably BS."

So we come to a nice little tie-in with my actual point, but first I need to explain one more thing: Axioms. You might've heard of these things in math class, but if you haven't (or, rather, simply forgot what they are), then allow me to explain. An Axiom is "a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true;" basically, it's a rule that you make up to explain something, then explore to decide whether it's true or not. You could postulate that 3*15=9.22 as the Axiom of Weird, but would be ultimately disproven by about a billion other Axioms that actually follow basic mathematical science.

Why do I bring up Math in a Philosophy discussion? Well, firstly because a lot of Philosophers were also Mathematicians (You might know René Descartes as the guy who said "I think, therefore, I am," but he also, like, invented modern geometry), and secondly because the method of using Axioms to postulate theories is very important for my point today, because Philosophy uses them as the basis of all knowledge.

The first Axiom in Philosophy is what I'm going to call the Axiom of Reason, which basically means that "Logic is logical." This might seem ridiculous at first, but if you don't assume that logic is logical, then you both completely undermine the nature of reality and doom all knowledge to the endless void of chaos. Plato called humans "rational animals" (and also featherless bipeds, but that's not important right now), and pretty much every Philosopher ever has agreed that if we can't use Logic of all things to discern the nature of reality, then there's no point in even trying.

That's not the point I'm about to tear to pieces, because if I did then I would immediately be forced to stop doing that due to my own constraints. No, I'm going to analyze a second, slightly sneakier sort-of-Axiom: the Axiom of Fundamentalism, which basically means that "Crazy people are probably wrong most of the time."

This goes back to the whole "your Philosophy can be different from my Philosophy" thing, but dials it up to eleven to consider the people whose method of logic is completely different from that of the common man's. While you and I might disagree, we can sit down and have a respectful exchange of reason over coffee and math homework, and even if we still wind up disagreeing we can come to the conclusion that the other has a perfectly sound perspective, because we could follow each other's logic as reasonable and good.

However, consider a sentient monkey, who I will call Spock to make things unnecessarily confusing. Suppose this monkey went about his entire monkey life as a regular monkey, but in a freak accident was imbued with the full mental capacity of a human. Spock is now a rational animal (and, of course, a featherless biped), and so begins to postulate his own theory of the natural world - but he has had a completely different experience from the rest of humanity, and his logic is structured in a completely different way from the kind that we humans tend to (mostly) agree upon.

This raises the issue of our limited understanding of logic itself being... well, limited. Incomplete. We can assume that even if our interpretation of logic can be wrong, that Logic Itself is still true, and that our interpretations are near the truth by association. This is the Axiom of Fundamentalism, which postulates that most sane people can comprehend logic and, therefore, the nature of reality.

Emphasis on "sane."

There are insane people in this world, but they're only insane because we "sane" people decided that they are. We say "they aren't reasonable" and shut out their logic. And perhaps we're right, and it's better to assume that we are right - in fact, I'm going to go as far as to say that we should say that we're right. I'm not saying that "we're all wrong and the insane people are right," I'm saying that there is a fundamental flaw in the basis of this Axiom that means that logic is still something we have to agree upon.

But fortunately that doesn't matter, because the sun still rises in the morning regardless of if we're wrong about why.

kay bye