My Personal Catechism
...to borrow a term from a different faith...
Going through my paper journals, I have come across some notes in which I was trying to distill what I have written so far of my attempt at a book of philosophy:
Calypso de los Todos Santos del Mundo
or,
The Teachings of the Mad Prophet
The 'tenets' of my 'faith' are fairly simple- I think- though I have met with argument against them in discussion with others, not much of which impresses me.
Why that is has something to do with my particular outlook on life, but it also has to do with the rigors that thinking must undergo to be considered not merely logical or rational but verifiably true.
The best place to start- and fairer to you, perhaps*- probably would be with the rules of logic which govern my thinking, rather than the tenets themselves.
Rule: If the premise of an argument is false, then the conclusion of that argument must also be considered false, regardless of the factuality of any of the evidence given in support of the argument between the premise and the conclusion.
(NB: The conclusion of the argument may be proven true by a separate argument which has a valid premise, but this does not validate the argument that has been shown to be false.)
Rule: All data must be taken into account. You may not pick and choose to select only that data which supports the conclusion to the argument that you favor.
Rule: All data is suspect.
Rule: All conclusions are suspect and must be tested; the process which I prefer for doing so tests first against my own ability to build a counterargument, then against my friends' ability to construct a counterargument, and then (this must be done with some care so as to not skew the results through an enemy's understanding of what I am trying to accomplish) against my enemies' ability to construct a counter argument.
An argument which passes all of these tests and remains intact is not necessarily truth, but arguments which pass all three levels of testing are more likely to be true than those which do not.
*Provided you're actually interested- this is all pretty dry...
[edit: updated here.]
Going through my paper journals, I have come across some notes in which I was trying to distill what I have written so far of my attempt at a book of philosophy:
Calypso de los Todos Santos del Mundo
or,
The Teachings of the Mad Prophet
The 'tenets' of my 'faith' are fairly simple- I think- though I have met with argument against them in discussion with others, not much of which impresses me.
Why that is has something to do with my particular outlook on life, but it also has to do with the rigors that thinking must undergo to be considered not merely logical or rational but verifiably true.
The best place to start- and fairer to you, perhaps*- probably would be with the rules of logic which govern my thinking, rather than the tenets themselves.
Rule: If the premise of an argument is false, then the conclusion of that argument must also be considered false, regardless of the factuality of any of the evidence given in support of the argument between the premise and the conclusion.
(NB: The conclusion of the argument may be proven true by a separate argument which has a valid premise, but this does not validate the argument that has been shown to be false.)
Rule: All data must be taken into account. You may not pick and choose to select only that data which supports the conclusion to the argument that you favor.
Rule: All data is suspect.
Rule: All conclusions are suspect and must be tested; the process which I prefer for doing so tests first against my own ability to build a counterargument, then against my friends' ability to construct a counterargument, and then (this must be done with some care so as to not skew the results through an enemy's understanding of what I am trying to accomplish) against my enemies' ability to construct a counter argument.
An argument which passes all of these tests and remains intact is not necessarily truth, but arguments which pass all three levels of testing are more likely to be true than those which do not.
*Provided you're actually interested- this is all pretty dry...
[edit: updated here.]