Woxor

I don't understand how you cannot acknowledge the fallibility of perception -- that is the very essence of subjectivity, and yet the contrary claim is being made. I came here to attempt to reconcile my beliefs with the philosophy of Objectivism, but that seems impossible since the traditional logic which I am used to has been flatly rebuffed. Though I am sure the advice falls on deaf ears, I think some (not all) of you would probably do well to examine things more closely and less passionately. Towards the end, my arguments and questions received little in the way of specifically tailored responses and more of the same illogical reactionism that first drove me away from Objectivism. This discourages me from taking Objectivism seriously, though I realize that the members do not necessarily represent the actual philosophy. It appears I have inadvertently worn out my welcome. Rad Cap, you seem to have a lot of unwarranted hostility, though I thank you for your earnestness. I have been debating philosophy for years, but I have never taken a philosophy class in school. I am not a troll -- I study chemical engineering and pure mathematics at Texas A&M and find philosophy interesting at times. I believe everything I have posted here and have been as honest as possible. I post on Hobbes, a forum that GreedyCapitalist occasionaly ventures into (that's how I found out about these forums). You will find that my beliefs represented there are the same as those here. I post as Woxor, though the appearance of my name in that forum has been altered to the Prince symbol. I can be found there on the off-chance that anyone wishes to contact me. I would be happy to discuss it further there, but I feel that I am intruding here. As I promised, I'm leaving now.

lol I don't think death is implied by lack of assumption. Chimps aren't exactly Objectivists, and they're still around. I'm fine with the rest of that, though -- it can be necessary for knowledge and the starting point for epistemology.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It's extremely easy to speak without thinking, so it's not quite correct to imply that making a statement implies the acceptance of anything. Furthermore, it's not necessary that one make any statements at all.

Which statement, the one in the second sentence? "That's fine"? I'm not sure what you mean by "identification." I'm not really claiming that the axioms are contradictory, and I have no idea how any abstract idea like an axiom would "exist." I'm simply disputing the method with which the axioms are obtained and the characterization of them afterward as necessary. So, the axioms can be observed? In that case, they are inductive inferences that you stated before you made your observations -- hardly things appropriately termed "axioms." I don't think any meaningful information can be extracted from tautologies. Also, emphasis (i.e. your capitalization) isn't really something that logic handles very well -- all three statements technically say the same thing, regardless of the intended meaning. This is even further from the appropriate application of logic, since you seem to be claiming that these tautologies describe reality in some way. I don't think that tautologies are capable of describing reality. Using existence to mean "that which exists," yeah, it exists by definition. But regarding the objectivity of reality, perception is not a perfect epistemic method. There is no way to determine with complete certainty whether your perceptions are due to an objective reality or due to deception. If you want to equate existence with objective reality, you can do that, but it's still potentially divorced from perception, which means the validation you spoke of is not flawless. If perception implies 100% certainty, then people have been 100% certain of ridiculous things that they halucinated or imagined. I would think it obvious that perception is fallible.

One could simply not assume anything, or not assume anything having to do with actual truth. "Necessary in order to make sense or do anything useful" is fine with me -- "inherently necessary" is not. Yeah, it would be logically impossible to deny the existence of that which exists, but I'm not even necessarily contesting the primacy of existence (I do believe that reality is objective). It's all a matter of epistemology -- I don't think it is necessarily true that reality is objective.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that there are such things as all those, simply because the notion of the "existence" of concepts themselves strikes me as a misleading way to look at things, but that may be a topic for another thread. Beyond that, I could easily have uncertainty in my belief in cognition, etc. just as there is uncertainty associated with the notion of reality. I'm not at all intending to question whether objective reality exists, just how it can be known and with what degree of certainty. Don't get me wrong; nothing has been destroyed, and no attempt has been made in that direction. All I've done is label our acceptance of reality as arbitrary, something which is apparently not palatable to all. I think this likely has more to do with the connotations with the word "arbitrary" than with an actually discrepancy in our logical methods. (I'm not trying to provoke you into responding further if you intend not to -- this reply is simply for the thread's sake and mine if others choose to participate.)

(Ironically, a few of Euclid's methods were a bit flawed, but that's irrelevant.) The method is nothing more than logic. I don't see why this shouldn't be used in epistemology.

It's not at all a matter of trapping, but I'm afraid you can't consider illogical methods logical no matter how you phrase it. If your starting point is illogical, e.g. unexamined acceptance, that's fine -- I have no reason to fault that, just so long as it's acknowledged as illogical. Philosophy is a matter of logic, and (as you anticipated I would say) "just look" is not logical. Common sense, sure, but not logic. I don't understand why you would imply that identifying the notion of objective reality as an arbitrary assumption makes it any more difficult to understand the world than identifying it as a necessary truth. Even if knowledge has no more than arbitrary foundation, this can still be worked with. Calculus and geometry are built upon arbitrary axioms, but both are rigid, logical, and useful. Why should our axiomatic model of reality suffer from additional requirements that obviously do not hinder mathematics? I don't consider myself confused, just unsure of Objectivist epistemology. I am relatively sure that the questions I pose are not meaningless; if the meaning is not relevant, or if Objectivism has no answer to them, that is all that must be said for progress to be made.

Logical statements with the characteristic "true" that are used as a starting point in a syllogism. In a deductive context, statements are characterized as true if they follow logically from true statements. In a (weak) inductive context, statements are characterized as probably being true if sensory data (or implicating ideas) indicate that the statement applies to reality (or to said ideas). I understand your implication that the notion of truth requires the notion of objective reality, but I fail to see why you would consider this an inductive context, and thus fail to see how your implication could be true. EDIT: Beyond that, that route only attempts to show why one requires the notion of objective reality before one can employ the notion of truth, not why one must necessarily believe in objective reality.

Nah, chemical engineering and math -- never took any philosophy. It's what we mathematicians do. There is no other option. I'm afraid I can't accept self-evidence as a logical epistemic method without seeing exactly what it means. If, as you, Peikoff, and Aristotle claim, denial of the axioms results in their assumption, then it should be easy to show the logical progression from "not X" to "X," where X is one of the fundamental axioms. I know of no such progression, though I would readily accept it were it displayed here. EDIT: It just struck me that reaffirmation through denial is necessarily proof by reductio ad absurdum. If that's how you arrive at your axioms, they're theorems that follow from the law of non-contradiction, not axioms.

Well, "arbitrary" would be the opposite of "necessary." If something is arbitrary, it need not be assumed, but may be assumed. That brings me to "assume," which means, "to state without justification." That, in turn, leads to "justification," which is the reason for believing an idea, and we finally end up at the pivotal definition of "reasoning." A reason for believing something (at least the way I've been using the word) is a sound, logical argument for that thing -- it requires true premises and a valid logical method for concluding something from those premises. With axioms, there can obviously be no reasoning behind them (by definition). They cannot have prior premises, or they would not be axioms. Thus, I fail to see how one could make a logical case for the necessity of an axiom. I do, however, see a perfectly logical method of arbitrarily assuming an axiom.

That's fine with me, but it causes the acceptance of reality to be arbitrary. If belief in objective reality cannot be justified without circular reasoning (which I would agree is the case), it must be assumed. So long as this assumption is recognized as such, the epistemology sits very well with me. However, your usage of "self-evident" leads me to wonder whether the Objectivist position holds that this is, in fact, an arbitrary assumption, or makes some claim as to the necessity of the axiom.

Well, I would just loosely define it as a logical reason for me to believe something. I'm more interested in how Objectivists define it, though, since its their reasoning I'm after.

Awesome. I just figured I'd start in Basic Questions in case that was expected of noob threads. Well, your short answer seems entirely agreeable to me. When I spoke to Objectivists beforehand, though, it seemed that a heavier emphasis was placed on a sort of a priori method. Perhaps this was a misrepresentation of Objectivism; I don't know.

I agree with everything you posted except for part of this. While I do believe that objective reality exists, I don't believe that obviousness is a valid epistemic method. (For example, Euclidean geometry is "obvious," but is no truer than its partial negation, hyperbolic geometry.) Is there any justification for believing that objective reality exists, or is it simply assumed? EDIT: Unless you meant that "reality," by definition, is objective, which I would agree with, but that leaves the question of its existence unanswered.