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Once I have the elements of a system labeled and / or defined carefully I can examine it using logic. There are many forms of logic, and I have mentioned some of them in a previous blog entry, so to avoid being tediously tedious (Not only is that phrase a creative redundancy, but belies the fact that I rather enjoy tedium – so long as I am the cause thereof and not on the receiving end.) I will not reintroduce them here. If I think of formal logic, then I think of logic as linguistic constructs. To a large extent logic of this sort is the avoidance of known fallacies. Fallacies are means of thinking that may seem to be correct, but which are not. I will now expose my gentle readers to a fallacy: Premise 1: If it rains, then the streets will get wet. Premise 2: The streets are wet. Conclusion: It is raining This is a fallacy because although the conclusion may be correct, it will be correct only by chance. This fallacy is called (labeled) ”Affirming the consequent”. Certainly the streets can be wet due to rain; this alleged argument cannot allow for snow melt, swimming … Continue reading →

Often I find that some thing that someone wants me to believe is so sloppily created that I must re-label and redefine many terms within that system before I can even begin to subject it to the next stage of logical analysis. You will note that in the preceding post I used ”label” and ”define” as synonymous or nearly so. That is because as I see it and understand it and so label it; a definition is an extended label. Please allow me to demonstrate. I used, in that previous post, the word, ”chair” as an example of a label. There are actually two words, ”chair” to be considered. There is the written word, ”chair” which is made up of characters which visually denote sounds which correspond to the spoken word, ”chair” which some of you heard inside your head as you read the word. Either the written or the spoken word calls forth a concept of the chair. Concept is a tougher thing to define, I will attempt to do so. Concept is a specific application of a small portion of set theory. ”there exists a set of all chairs.” there it is: a concept is a set of … Continue reading →

Unlike deductive, inductive logic is capable of certainty. This is for a simple reason. Induction is, in its essence, a matter of labeling. If I label a thing, then with some high degree of certainty that label labels that thing; well, at least that is labeled by that label within my personal system. This may sound dull and uninteresting. I notice a thing; I give it a label: therefore that thing is so labeled. There is rather a lot that can go wrong with this apparently simple system of labeling. Here are a few of them: 1. This is my system and it may not correspond to other’s systems. This can result in communication errors. Further, if I adopt to any extent at all any aspect of that external labeling system, then I can suffer from uncertainty within my own system. This happens more often than I like because I find myself frequently relabeling and hence redefining words which are used carelessly within a not too literate society. I do think that my autism causes this first issue to be highly probable, and also large in magnitude. 2. The label is not the thing; the thing is not the label. … Continue reading →

The first criterion for selection of what might stay on my blackboard is that of reliability. What is my level of confidence in any specific statement? Now, I must say that my autism has a real effect upon my philosophizing. One of the things that we are renowned for is black and white thinking. This is one autism myth that seems often accurate; certainly I tend to be of intrinsic black and white thinking. A long term statement of mine (Sufficiently long term as to very much pre-date my knowing of my autism) is this: ”There is right, and there is everything else.” I will stand by this as useful, within parametric domain. If a deed being considered is indeed morally or ethically wrong, then it is so and no amount of ”argument” can alter my judgment. On the other hand this black and white mode of thinking is not so useful outside the parameters of morality and ethically. That is because most of what a person might know, that person cannot actually know! That statement requires investigation. There are two types of formal logic (Not the logic of mathematics, not Boolean Logic, not Rabbinical Logic.), which are inductive and … Continue reading →

When I design a house, I do so according to the client’s needs and desires and within a process determined by my design philosophy. With the over arching guidance of my philosophy, the needs and desires of the client are more likely to be fulfilled. When I set to do the hard work of taking things off my internal blackboard or placing new things onto it, I do so in accordance with my over arching meta philosophy. My meta philosophy is not then the philosophy which is running all the while as the software which I use to guide my actions. My meta philosophy is the set of rules that I employ to write that guiding software. Meta philosophy consists of criteria for judgment of each and every thing that will be writ on my black board. There are surprisingly few such criteria in my rule set, and here are the two major considerations which I use: 1. Is this reliable? 2. Is this good for me? There is one other consideration, but I want to leave it unstated for now and get on with consideration of these considerations (I love to use language like that!) and then spring the … Continue reading →