Monday, October 13, 2008

Axiomatic Reasoning

Being a mathematically minded person from a young age, I have had a great respect for formal mathematical systems such as Euclidian geometry, and the name of this blog book is in total respect and regard for Principia Mathematica, the great work on the foundation of mathematics. Similarly, I wanted to partly formalise my ideas on objective reasoning in this blog book. In reasoning, just as in mathematics, for a proof to have meaningful completeness, one must start with agreed upon axioms and demonstrate that they lead directly to the conclusion; or alternatively presume the opposite to be true, and come up with a contradiction. Note that one can still be "wrong" if the axioms don't quite reflect reality.

I often accept others axioms *For the benefit of the argument* . I don't want differences in conclusions to be a direct result of differences in starting points. The starting points can be argued about at a separate time. Logical Positivism is a denial that any *assumptions without proof* are required at all and that watertight *proofs* are still possible regardless. Without consistency of logic, proofs are not watertight, and science either implicitly or explicitly requires axioms, like it or not. Thus, anyone who rejects metaphysics and theology, and thinks axioms are not required, I would label as a logical positivist, whose implicit axioms are the rejection of metaphysics and theology as false. Having implicit assumptions, but explicitly denying that they are assumptions, I believe to be a form of cheating when it comes to philosophy. This is why I have put axiomatic reasoning as my first principle:

1)Marconomics rejects Logical Positivism, as a basis for philosophical argument. Marconomics regards a call to the concepts that form its basis as cheating. On the one hand, it defines reality in terms of observations, yet ignores its problems of self-consistency.

1 comment:

Chris Fellows said...

Hear, hear! A good first axiom.