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I can also talk about weuisfdyhkj. It's a label. In itself not more meaningful than the label you use. You think that you know what the label means but if your brain can't simulate a reality behind the label it has no meaning. According to Wittgenstein we should therefore not speak about it.
I think I know my answer to this- I've realised my definition of "rational" subtly differs from LessWrong's. When you see mine, you'll see this wasn't my fault.
A set of rules is rational, I would argue, if that set of rules by it's very nature must correlate with reality- if one applies those rules to the evidence, they must reveal what is true. Even if skepticism is false, then it is a mere coincidence that our assumptions the world is not an illusion, our memories are accurate etc happened to be correct as we had no rational rule that would show us that they were. We do not even have a role that we must rationally consider it probable.
One of the rules of such rationality is that pragmatism is explicitly ruled out. Pragmatic considerations have no necessary correlation with what is actually true, therefore they should not be considered in determining what is true. The consideration of whether human beings are or are not capable of believing something is a pragmatic consideration.
You claim that skepticism is incoherent. Firstly, this is circular as you assume things to get to this conclusion. Second, even if you take those assumptions humans are capable of understanding the concept of "I don't know". Applying this concept to absolutely everything is effectively what skepticism is.
There are all kinds of things that are true in every possible universe that aren't self-evident. Look up "necessary a posteriori" for examples. So no, self-evident is not the same as necessary, at least not according to a very popular philosophical approach to possible worlds (Kripke's). More generally, "necessity" is a metaphysical property, and "self-evidence" is an epistemic property. Just because a proposition has to be true does not mean it is going to be obvious to me that it has to be true. Even Descartes makes this distinction. He doesn't regard all the truths of mathematics to be self-evident (he says he may be mistaken about their derivation), but presumably he does not disagree that they are necessarily true. (Come to think of it, he may disagree that they are necessarily true, given his extreme theological voluntarism, but that's an orthogonal debate.)
As for your question about standards: I think it is a very plausible principle that "ought" implies "can". If I (or anyone else) have an obligation to do something, then it must at least be possible for me to do it. So, in so far as I have a rational obligation to have justified beliefs, it must be possible for me to justify my beliefs. If you're using the word "justification" in a way that renders it impossible for me to justify any belief, then I cannot have any obligation to justify my beliefs in that sense. And if that's the case, then skepticism regarding that kind of justification has no bite. Sure, my beliefs aren't justified in that rigorous sense, but if I have no rational obligation to justify them, why should I care?
So either you're using "justification" in a sense that I should care about, in which case your standards for justification shouldn't be so high as to render it impossible, or you're using "justification" in Descartes's highly rigorous sense, in which case I don't see why I should be worried, since rationality cannot require that impossible standard of justification. Either way, I don't see a skeptical problem.
It seems we're using different definitions of words here. Maybe I should clarify a bit.
The definition of rationality I use (and I needed to think about this a bit) is a set of rules that must, by their nature, correlate with reality. Pragmatic considerations do not correlate with reality, no matter how pressing they may seem.
Rather than a rational obligation, it is a fact that if a person is irrational then they have no reason to believe that their beliefs correlate with the truth, as they do not. It is merely an assumption they have.
I guess it's hard for me to understand what's irrational about advising them to eat the rice (as you indicated you would do). It seems like the only sane choice. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "faith", but if advising people to eat the rice is based on it, then it must be compatible with rationality, right?
Right--choose the rice, assuming you (or they) want to live. That seems like the only sane choice, doesn't it?
Maybe this is a problem of terminology. You seem to be using the labels "faith" and "reason" in certain ways. Especially, you seem to be using the label "reason" to refer to the following of certain rules, but which you can't see how to justify.
Maybe instead of focusing on those rules (whatever they may happen to be), you should focus on why the rules are valuable in the first place (if they are). Presumably, it's because they reliably lead to success in achieving one's goals. The worth of the rules is contingent on their usefulness; it's not rational to believe only things you can prove with absolute certainty, because that would mean believing nothing, doing nothing, dying early and having no fun, and nobody wants that!
(In case you haven't read it, you might want to check you Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality, from 2008.)
My conception of reason is based on determining what is true, completely and entirely irrespective of pragmatism. To call skeptical arguments irrational and call an anti-skeptical case rational would mean losing sight of the important fact that ONLY pragmatic considerations lead to the rejection of skepticism.
Rationality, to me, is defined as the hypothetical set of rules which reliably determine truth, not by coincidence, but because they must determine truth by their nature. Anything which does not follow said rules are irrational. Even if skepticism is false, believing in the world is irrational for me (and you, based on what I've heard from you and my definition) because nothing necessarily leads to a correlation between the senses and reality.
One of the rules of my rationality is that pragmatic considerations are not to be taken into account, as what is useful to believe and what is true have no necessary correlation. This applies for anything which has no necessary correlation with what is true.
What you're talking about is pragmatic, not rational. It is important to be aware of the distinction between what one may 'believe' for some reason and what is likely to be actually true, completely independent of such beliefs.
On reason... On faith...
So, which advice would you give?
In the real world, it depends. With most people in practice, assuming they have enough of an understanding of me to know I am a skeptic on these things and are implicitly asking for one or the other, I give that. Therefore I normally give advice on faith.
- “rational” is not a binary.
- You'd have to assume induction to say that something is better (more optimal, more rational) than something else.
So, what are you trying to say?
"Better" isn't a function of the real world anyway- I'm appealing to it because most people here want to be rational, not because it is objectively better.
What do you mean by "rational" is not a binary?
OK. I am still not exactly sure what you mean by "justification." Let's put this in more concrete terms. Imagine the following:
Sitting down to dinner you see three items on the table before you: a bowl of rice, a bowl of gasoline, and a coin. Suppose further that you prefer rice over gasoline. You have three choices--eat the rice, drink the gasoline, or flip the coin and let the result determine the contents of which bowl to consume.
What does the Evil Demon Argument (and all in its family) say about the rationality of each choice, compared to the others (assuming it says anything at all)?
What advice would you personally give someone sitting at such a dinner table, and why?
The Evil Demon Argument says that you don't know that it's actually those three things before you. Further, it says that you don't know that eating the rice will actually have the effects you're used to, or that your memories can be used to remember your preferences. Etc etc...
On reason, I would give no advice. On faith, I would say to have the rice.
Either there a reality and then there a basis or there reality in the first place and it's meaningless to speak about things having a basis in reality.
I mean do you believe that reality has a basis in reality?
I think we mean different things by "basis in reality". I use it to refer to something correlating with the real world, and evidence that demonstrates such a connection either probable or certain. Probability, of course, can only work if probability were somehow demonstrated valid.
Circular arguments do not count as a basis in reality, hence your argument, which assumes the existence of physical brains, does not work.
In that case, I don't know how to proceed until you formulate your skepticism more precisely. What exactly is it that is not justified, if "skepticism wins"?
Nothing is justified if skepticism wins. Unless we have irrational faith in at least one starting assumption (and it is irrational since we have no basis for making the assumption), it is impossible to determine anything except our lack of knowledge.
So on thought, yes. There is never any valid rational reason to discriminate between possibilities because nothing can demonstrate the Evil Demon Argument false.
Your universal propositional calculus might not be able to generate that proposition, but my calculus can easily prove: Yours won't generate any propositions if it has no axioms.
This is precisely the problem. I was posting in the hopes of finding some clever solution to this problem- a self-proving axiom, as it were.
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But you are not applying it to everything. You have a strong belief in a platonic ideal of rationality on which you base your concept.
Take the buddhists who actually don't attach themselves to mental concepts. They have sayings such as: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him".
You are not willing that you don't know what skepticism happens to be because you have attachement to it. This is exactly what Wittengsteins sentence is about. We shouldn't talk about those concepts.
The buddhists also don't take in a rational sense about it. They meditate and have a bunch of koans but they are mystics. You just don't get to be a platonic idealist and no mystic and have skepticism be valid.
Not exactly Platonic- I have no belief whatsoever, on faith or reason, in ideal forms. As for why rationalism, I believe in it because rationalist arguments in this sense can be inherently self-justifying. This comes from starting from no assumptions.
However, I then show that such rationality fails in the long run to skeptical arguments of it's own sort, just as other types of rationality do. I focus on it because it is the only one with a halfway credible answer to skepticism.
I have already shown I know what skepticism is- not knowing anything whatsoever. You haven't refuted this argument, given that "I don't know" is a valid Epistemic state.