Right Reason

In my Mission Statement, I appealed to the use of right reason.   Subjective relativists would naturally object to this appeal to "right reason" as being somehow based on an absolute and dogmatic notion of rightness with regards to reason.  But I say there are certain laws of reasoning that are indeed absolute and have borne much fruit over the millennia as so much evidence in their favor.  One great big pile of such fruit is, of course, that of natural science and mathematics.  People who seriously doubt the validity of the whole enterprise of rational science are themselves not to be taken seriously and are, I hope, quite in the minority anyhow.  Certainly, even among scientists there are those who are overly influenced by the corrupting influences of fame, fortune and power, and that situation is quite deplorable.  But on the whole, over the course of centuries, science has acquitted itself quite well as a successful enterprise.

And as chief tools in the tool shed of science I would list logic and mathematics, the latter being to a great degree reducible to the former.    Logic, of course, has both its deductive and inductive sides, the former being more compelling and universally conceived and assented to than the latter.  Among the laws of deductive logic are rules of inference such as modus ponens which states, schematically at least, that if the proposition P is held to be true and the compound statement that P implies Q is also held to be true, then it must follow that Q is true.   I.e., if P implies Q and P is true, then Q must be true.  Humans have almost universally concurred with that rule of inference.

With inductive logic things can get a little messier and agreement about how to calculate truth values is also less than universal, but we can rest assured with the simple example of modus ponens that there is indeed a clear example of right reason in the case of deductive logic.

It is also the job of right reason to point out where right reason is not present, that is to say, to point out where fallacious pseudo-reasoning rears its ugly head.  For that purpose we have a very large catalog of fallacies that has been amassed by the human race over the millennia.

Thus, to amplify on my mission statement, I will try to bring both positive deductive thinking to play in this blog and to point out fallacies when I see them in the political and social discourse of the day.