Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00676)

Jerry Schueler wrote:

>Tom:
>>Logic is not a matter of opinion.  It is not subject to whim.  It is 
>>simple to show who is being logical and who isn't. 

>This sounds like pure fundamentalism.  

I think of fundamentalism as settling on specific premises and
closed-mindedly adhering to them.  It assumes that reality and one's
perception of it are identical, being blind to the distinction between the
two and to the fact that the only possible ultimate authority is one's own
subjective judgment, believing, rather, that some objective truth or
truths, or some other individual or group, can be a higher authority.

It is impossible to eradicate all of one's own fundamentalism.  Everyone
inevitably regards their own ideas as superior to those of others, since,
if some other idea was considered to be an improvement, it would
automatically become one's own.  Everything that everyone says has some
fundamentalism and arrogance in it.  

There is nothing that is purely objective or purely subjective.  Everything
is a unique mixture of the two.  I may have literally overstated how
objective the laws of logic are somewhat, since there is some room for some
debate about some of them, but, generally, they are highly objective.  They
are much easier to demonstrate than, say, whether Ken Griffey, Jr. or Barry
Bonds is a better baseball player.  I believe you overstated their
subjectivity far more than I overstated their objectivity.  Consider a
syllogism of the type:

Premise: If A, then B
Premise: A
Conclusion: B  

Although there may be all kinds of room for debate about the truth of the
premises, I see no room for debate about the conclusion, assuming the
premises are true.  Unless my logic is mistaken, which is always possible,
if someone concluded something other than B from this syllogism, they would
have been illogical.