View source for Philosophical Delusions

[[Category:Uncategorized]]
== A Priori ==
There is no such thing as a priori knowledge.  All human knowledge shows clear signs of having been learned though physiological development, induction, transmission, etc.

There is a great deal of confusion such as whether 1+1=2 is a priori knowledge.  No, it is not.  It is a model that we choose to employ for a number of real-world circumstances because it gives good predictions for those fields.  But it is only one of a vast number of models which are applicable in various other instances.  For example, if I put a big fish into a tank with a little fish, 1+1=1.   If I put a pregnant animal in a box, after a while 1=several.  And that is an integer model: we may want real number models.  Is mathematics a priori knowledge?  No: we merely select the mathematics in the space of possible mathematics that most interests us because it makes useful models or has particularly consistent principles.  it would be easy to have mathematics where 1+1=3, but theer wouldn't be much consistent about it in ways we find useful.  We used to think Euclidean geometry was a priori, but then we found that the assumptions could be changed (and needed to be to make useful non-Euclidean geometries for Einstein's space-time.)
== Rationalism ==
My conclusion on rationalism is that everything is founded on sand.
Some things work better than others, and we apparently can discern that.
But the search for rock upon which to build firm foundations is as foolish
as presuming that real rock is eternal and immobile.  (We know it weathers,
how it was formed, that it moves with crustal plates, on a planet spinning
through an orbit around a star which orbits a galaxy which....)

Much philosophy, objectivism included, is dreadfully in error in trying to
found things more firmly than we know reality allows.  And they use what boil
down to parlor tricks to try to convince people that the foundations are solid.
== Post Modernism ==
Too often an example of greedy reductionism.
== Ought ==
Hume's fallacy of the derivation of ought from is still catches most people.  There is no direct ought: there is only what we desire.  We can make consequentialist arguments based on our desires: because we want something, we ought to do something else if we want to get it.
== Natural Rights ==
Natural rights were a political trick invented to oppose the idea of rights of kings.  The populace at large didn't have rights of kings, but they certainly could claim to have natural rights.