Transvaginal Probes and Genetic Testing | Clarissa's Blog
I find that it is extremely common for males from Northern America to try to use logic to do the role that religion otherwise plays for them. In effect, they misunderstand the nature of logic because they assume that it can furnish them with a world view and confirm the difference between absolute truth and absolute error. In actual fact, logic doesn't quite work in this way. Rather, it is a method to insure consistency between various statements one may make. If one's world view is already messed up or nonexistent, pure logic cannot give you a world view. It's not a means to define what is real and what isn't. In fact the logical positivists were severely let down when they tried to use it in that way. They grappled endlessly with the statement, "Pegasus doesn't exist."
They went mad over it, because they had a very significant problem with trying to get language to do all the work of defining reality for them when language was already capable of asserting a fantastical creature's existence (despite retracting the sense of its existence with the word, "not".) If one can use a word, then that means it is necessarily indicative of part of absolute reality -- so reasoned the logical positivists. But they were mistaken. Language is a relativistic structure or what Nietzsche calls "a mobile army of metaphors".
In any case, language and logic can't do all the work for us of furnishing us with a world view. Our reason is not bestowed from above, but emerges from our humanity. To think otherwise is to embrace a quasi-religious perspective, without realizing one is doing this.
Indeed such quasi-religious perspectives may present a clear and present danger to public health, if one happens to be sucked into the vacuity that is North American "thinking".
I find that it is extremely common for males from Northern America to try to use logic to do the role that religion otherwise plays for them. In effect, they misunderstand the nature of logic because they assume that it can furnish them with a world view and confirm the difference between absolute truth and absolute error. In actual fact, logic doesn't quite work in this way. Rather, it is a method to insure consistency between various statements one may make. If one's world view is already messed up or nonexistent, pure logic cannot give you a world view. It's not a means to define what is real and what isn't. In fact the logical positivists were severely let down when they tried to use it in that way. They grappled endlessly with the statement, "Pegasus doesn't exist."
They went mad over it, because they had a very significant problem with trying to get language to do all the work of defining reality for them when language was already capable of asserting a fantastical creature's existence (despite retracting the sense of its existence with the word, "not".) If one can use a word, then that means it is necessarily indicative of part of absolute reality -- so reasoned the logical positivists. But they were mistaken. Language is a relativistic structure or what Nietzsche calls "a mobile army of metaphors".
In any case, language and logic can't do all the work for us of furnishing us with a world view. Our reason is not bestowed from above, but emerges from our humanity. To think otherwise is to embrace a quasi-religious perspective, without realizing one is doing this.
Indeed such quasi-religious perspectives may present a clear and present danger to public health, if one happens to be sucked into the vacuity that is North American "thinking".
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