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Old 11-28-2007, 06:53 PM
VarlosZ VarlosZ is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Manhattan
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Default Re: Society, Intuition and Logic

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I was going to raise that point earlier and state that 'knowing my mother loves me' is often just a claim about you and not about her but since that rather brushes aside your position it didn't seem fair. Now, your 'being angry' example seems to indicate you are merely concerned with internal reports of things we are experiencing and not making claims about external facts.
??

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I can see how that would be confusing; I apologise. In fact, I'm talking about both internal reports and external facts. (Or, if you prefer, I'm talking about neither; language is fun.) The example I gave yesterday afternoon was about interpersonal relations -- not just your state of being or the other person's, but the relationship between the two.

At the risk of once again getting bogged down in specifics, a simple thought experiment: imagine you're from a race of intergalactic androids, and you're tasked with detailing every possible facet of human society. Now use your logic to describe what "friendship" is, spaceman. While you could describe it's apparent external effects, your approach to knowledge would severely limit your ability to understand the thing itself.

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What does it feel like to be angry?
How did that get into comparing sources of knowledge about the external world.

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This isn't really what I was had in mind before, but there is a way in which that question speaks to knowledge of the external world: we extrapolate information from our own subjective experiences. What does it mean for my friend to be angry, and what are the likely psychological implications of his anger? Logic can tell you that his experience is probably a lot like yours, but that still leaves you reliant on a non-logical process for your information about the outside world.

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My position is we can and do make judgments on others state of mind, intentions, motives on an intuitive basis, some of us are better at it than others in some areas and worse in some. "worse and better" refer to being right about the conclusions we reach.

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Sounds fine to me.
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