Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument for God's existence by the mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978).
On 01/07/2014 02:04 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> (3) Reasoning illogically -- Clearly violating fundamental rules of logic. All swans are white; this bird is a crow; this bird is white.
I think this is the most difficult problem to identify. However, back
when we were discussing tautologies, this thought nagged at me. The
validity of conjunction elimination (P,Q => P) relies fundamentally on a
kind of static, small universe. If the universe is dynamic and/or too
large, then the use of conjunctive elimination (normally considered a
truth preserving rule) puts our argument at risk of false conclusions. E.g.
Let's assert:
A
C
B is, as yet, indeterminate.
A,C => A is a valid rule. But if we later discover B, ~(B^A), then that
entire link in the _chain_ of reasoning becomes a rat hole... a waste of
time, perhaps so cognitively jarring as to prevent people from accepting
B and - from now on - rejecting A. The people wallowing in that
reasoning link will have forgotten that we had a _choice_ in our
conjunctive elimination. We could have eliminated A rather than C.
I speculate that utopians like the libertarians do this a lot: i.e. use
locally valid rules that turn out to be distally invalid. But they
don't do it because they're stupid, only because they accept
simplification as a globally valid rule.
--
⇒⇐ glen
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