26
votes
Accepted
Is immorality just irrationality?
What you are describing is the Platonic view of good and evil, that no one does wrong willingly, but only out of ignorance. An unusually clear and explicit statement of this concept is found in Plato'...
- 27.1k
23
votes
Is it a fallacy to say that a sane person cannot apply rational thought to the motivations of the insane?
The second premise is false unless "heinous crime" and "insane" are defined to make it true by definition, in which case the definitions are question begging. But because people committing heinous ...
- 42.5k
17
votes
Is it a fallacy to say that a sane person cannot apply rational thought to the motivations of the insane?
I think the fallacy is something along the lines of:
Because we cannot provably apply rational thought to what motivates every insane person, every time, we can never apply rational thought to the ...
- 17.5k
15
votes
Accepted
Is it ever rational to stumble onto the conjunction fallacy in probability?
Well, the conjunction fallacy is a fallacy, so it's not rational to believe it. However...
Suppose Dave tells you he was just robbed and that's why he's were late to meet with you. You are skeptical, ...
- 11.1k
13
votes
Does philosophy rely on intuitions? If so, does this mean all of philosophy is nothing more than hunches?
Does philosophy rely on intuition? Yes. Does that mean it is nothing more than hunches? No. To conclude so would be the rather elementary fallacy of composition:
The fallacy of composition is an ...
- 22.8k
13
votes
Accepted
Is desire closed under logical equivalence?
No. Firstly, a person may not know that S and S' are logically equivalent, in which case the desires may fail to agree quite straightforwardly. If you amended the question to: is desire closed under ...
- 22.9k
9
votes
Is it a fallacy to say that a sane person cannot apply rational thought to the motivations of the insane?
There are multiple problems with these statements.
First, insane is not a boolean state. Sanity is a spectrum.
Second, I don't know of anything that says that everyone who commits a heinous crime is ...
- 241
9
votes
Is desire closed under logical equivalence?
In the strictest sense: no.
There's three questions here, with varying degrees of justification required:
Can I desire S without desiring S'?
Can I desire S and desire not-S'?
Can I desire S and ...
8
votes
Does philosophy shed any light on how parties can fruitfully debate without an agreed source of truth?
From a purely epistemological point of view, no, philosophy is not really helpful. If anything, philosophy makes things worse. See this post and this post and the responses to it.
From a social point ...
- 27.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Can it be rational to have beliefs one knows to be inconsistent?
It can. Ramsey put it nicely in his "last papers" written around 1929 under the influence of Peirce's pragmatism (quoted from Marion, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and British Pragmatism):
"We want our ...
- 42.5k
8
votes
Accepted
Can animals follow logical rules of inference?
The thought experiment is known as Chrysippus’s Dog and goes back to the named ancient Stoic. It was discussed by many modern philosophers, including Dennett, see Chrysippus’s Dog as a Case Study in ...
- 42.5k
7
votes
Accepted
Are there any aspects of science which do not change over time?
Like many other professional philosophers of science these days, I'm highly influenced by the contemporary disunity of science movement. So I would say that there aren't any general aspects of ...
- 2,467
6
votes
Is it a fallacy to say that a sane person cannot apply rational thought to the motivations of the insane?
I believe that would just be petitio principii, mistranslated as "begging the question." And doing it twice.
First, you assume the insanity after the fact, based on the evidence of the act, which is ...
- 13.3k
6
votes
Is immorality just irrationality?
Doesn't this then give the idea of a 'bad' person a different
implication - we wouldn't say the same to someone if they made a
mistake in math or in their finances yet people who are simply in
...
- 1,875
5
votes
Is there any prospect for a unified account of rationality?
Since this is multiple choice, I'll choose (b) and (c), with misgivings.
It is not hard to locate paradigms of what is meant by "rationality." At the etymological and stripped-down, Hobbesian level, ...
- 13.3k
5
votes
Is immorality just irrationality?
In English we often use the terms good and bad relative to an ideal. (In Spanish it is the same).
So we call a person a good person when some portion (Surly a majority but what percent I don't ...
- 171
5
votes
Does philosophy shed any light on how parties can fruitfully debate without an agreed source of truth?
Here are the questions regarding the extreme partisanship of politics today:
Is there any philosophical thinking which might help resolve these disputes and allow the political discussion to move ...
- 19.2k
5
votes
Does determinism prevent rationality?
John Lennox's idea is that we would have no reason to believe our own logical conclusions if nature, and therefore the brain itself, was deterministic.
He says (40:15 - 40:48) that there would be no ...
- 6,242
5
votes
Accepted
Which philosophers have considered irrational conviction
Most recently, the community of scholars who addresses irrationality with force and recognition is the behavioral economists, and one of the most famous scholars associated with it is Daniel Kahneman. ...
- 22.8k
5
votes
Is desire closed under logical equivalence?
So, how strict are we about defining "logical equivalence" here? Whether the answer is "yes" or "no" depends entirely on that.
If what we mean is just "S' holds in ...
- 526
5
votes
Is desire closed under logical equivalence?
Let A a 10-page long logical formula (or the corresponding sentence in English if you prefer) which is logically true but verifying it is beyond your or anyone else's capabilities.
You, presumably, ...
- 171
5
votes
Can the sexual double standard be justified according to this logic/reasoning?
The reasoning is a non sequitur: virginity is only losely correlated to fertility, and somewhat negatively.
Your reasoning for considering virginity desirable is that a woman who never had sex is not ...
- 5,124
4
votes
Is immorality just irrationality?
Morality doesn't have anything to do with rationality.
I'm going to be Nietzsche's advocate and say that "good" and "bad" are just labels on what a given society wants. This is by no means absolute ...
- 141
4
votes
Is immorality just irrationality?
I've given this a lot of thought as a Christian who has studied the Bible a lot and generally agrees with your reasoning here, having found overlap between the two that seems accurate to me.
Here is ...
- 143
4
votes
Why does Newcomb's paradox seem to have different solutions depending on when the choice is made despite determinism?
Newcomb's paradox was discussed at length by philosophers, with the issues of determinism, free will, time travel, etc., brought in. What it turned out to be, however, is an analog of Bertrand paradox ...
- 42.5k
4
votes
Two Solutions to the Problem of Death
I think one has to analyse a person's exact state of mind who fears their eventual demise. Rationality I take in the sense of instrumental rationality - taking efficient means to clearly conceived ...
- 35.4k
4
votes
Why should we treat others as *always* rational when they are not?
Kantian autonomy is determined by the faculty of reason, not by rational acts
In a strictly Kantian setting, the person is autonomous. Full stop. That is because there are two aspects in the will ...
- 13.5k
4
votes
Does determinism prevent rationality?
"If hard determinism is true, and our thoughts are merely the results of a causal chain of atomic interactions, are reason and logic illusory?"
Lennox is not speaking about "hard ...
- 397
4
votes
Does philosophy rely on intuitions? If so, does this mean all of philosophy is nothing more than hunches?
Philosophy challenges and formalises intuition
If you put some intuitive premises into a sound argument, you may end up with a false or unintuitive conclusion.
This then tells you that one of the ...
- 5,414
4
votes
Which philosophers have considered irrational conviction
I think we build models of the world outside and inside of us, and then use those models to be and act in the world. Very much like models in physics or in AI these days: we see various occurrences of ...
- 2,402
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