Combining Texts

Ideas for 'The Fixation of Belief', 'fragments/reports' and 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these texts

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


2 ideas

2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 4. Aims of Reason
Reason aims to discover the unknown by thinking about the known [Peirce]
     Full Idea: The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know.
     From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief [1877], p. 7)
     A reaction: I defy anyone to come up with a better definition of reasoning than that. The emphasis is on knowledge rather than truth, which you would expect from a pragmatist. …Actually the definition doesn't cover conditional reasoning terribly well.
2. Reason / C. Styles of Reason / 3. Eristic
Rational certainty may be victory in argument rather than knowledge of facts [Rorty]
     Full Idea: We can think of "rational certainty" as a matter of victory in argument rather than relation to an object known.
     From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 3.4)