M.D. Rawlings
Classical Liberal
Dear Boss:
1. to Justin's credit he did point out where MD was losing him on some of the definitions or logic that wasn't consistently used.
so he does try to correct some points with MD and isn't blindly following by any means
Actually, this is inaccurate. Justin did not adequately understand the distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. He had the right idea, by the way, vastly superior to Amrchaos' nonsense. He simply was not entirely clear on the fundamental distinction that goes to probability and certainty as it relates to the issue of logical possibility and logical necessity. Now part of his confusion was my fault because in one of my sentences, which I corrected, thanks to Justin, put the terms possibility and necessity together as it related to justified true belief/knowledge. Essentially, the statement was true, albeit, poorly expressed and arguably misleading. Justin picked up on that precisely because I cleared up the matter on the inductive-deductive dichotomy and the logical possibility-logical necessity dichotomy prior to the post that contained the error in expression.
In other words, the piece of the puzzle that remained a bit hazy for him became crystal clear, and as a result he was able to recognized a poorly expressed idea in my following post, a mere error in expression. It was not an error or inconsistency in thought or in logic.
The fact of the matter is that all logical possibilities are cognitive facts in and of themselves; that is to say, it is an objective fact of human cognition, for example, that it is possible that our universe is just one of an unknown number of other universes within a multiverse. That cogitation/proposition, in and of itself, is a logical necessity. The proposition that the object of that proposition has actual substance behind it is another issue altogether. That is a mere logical possibility and a hypothesis in science. It was this distinction that was in my mind at the time that I wrote that sentence. I simply failed to make that distinction clear, for the way the sentence read, on the face it, threw logical necessities and the latter kind of propositions of possibility together relative to justified true belief/knowledge. But in fact I was thinking the former kind, not the latter.
That Justin had a problem with the idea as it was expressed on the face of it is a good thing. He's got it down!