[Jake]
That's why I like pancritical rationalism. And for me, not even the higher
brow Bartley's approach, which I respectfully honor as inspiration for my
own. My version of this basically comes down to one statement, "All
representations remain in principal subject to rational criticism." The
statement itself is self referential and generally holds true, or at least
enjoys a fairly robust existence among other very close conceptual
configurations of roughly the same idea.
[Rhinoceros]
I have not given much thought to pancritical rationalism because at some time
I labeled it as "non-creative" and tautological. But I will take this chance
to check again.
[Jake2] Too late! You already have. :-)
Yes, it does have quite an appearance of tautology upon first encounter. But
that remains mostly because of its simplicity in essential description. It
leaves would-be professional philosophers without as much meat to chew on as
other much more elaborate justificational systems of philosophy tend to whet
their appetites a little too much. Munch Munch. Ultimately these other
justificational systems must live or die at the hands of the "sciences";
calling them "philosophy" seems to excuse some practitioners into ignoring
the implications of scientific findings on their most dear beliefs.
The reason that the explication seems like a tautology, is that the process
requires input, which the explication itself ("All representation . . . ")
imposes very minimal requirements . . . for instance that the statement/thing
in question actually is, or is intended in some respect to function as a
representation. Once we have some input, we realize that we do not have a
tautology, but rather a very simple and rational input and output system.
Indeed it has existed even before we named it, as our brains have implicit
neural logic that need no such explication to operate in the first place.
And this is another important point to pancritical rationalism, an
acknowledgment that all philosophical questions begin in media raza
(Literally "in the middle of the thing"). Even a philosophical memeplex that
purports to operate from a system of foundational "first principles", cannot
in fact actually succeed in doing such a thing. It may however succeed in
appearing that way to the indoctrinated. Principles themselves do indeed
emerge, and often robustly so, from the evolutionary flux of culture,
science, rational thought, and philosophy, but to imagine that these
principles themselves created the way we think, is to engage in a bit of
philosophical ego/meme mania.
-Jake
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