[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by hyfe

Yes, in purely academical world it does. In reality, it does not in the slightest affect how I perceive future arguments because I really haven't made up an opinion in either case, it does not matter for my current opinions because I refused to accept the argument in both cases. Wether I'm actively myself am going to search for documentation/facts are purely governed by my own laziness / interest on the subject.. and I don't think I'm very unique in this.

Well then, take my argument as an encouragement to go out and learn more whenever you can.

Ah, so something in your mind is either flagged as absolutely 100% certainly true, or 'not verified yet'. Must be a bitch watching the news? 'Well, I don't know wether this footage is faked and wether they paid these eye-witnesses, so I must choose not to believe until it's verified'.

No, because the assertion is differing from the norm. I've really started arguing for falsification here which is rather marvellous as I didn't really mean to but it's just sort of headed this way. Nobody has ever offered me convincing evidence that all news stories are being falsified. Reports which are published in let's say one paper and no others would not get much in the credibility rating from me and if I felt they were remotely important I'd probably investigate it. So "cat has three kittens" I won't bother investigating further but "cat has three puppies" I probably would.

I mean, you know as well as I do, that there is no such thing as certain. There's 'likely', 'really likely', and 'really, really, really likely'. If you want to use the latter exclusivly and change the others with 'not determined yet', feel free, but to me that makes you sound like someone who badly needs a therapist.

I don't really bother considering things as certainities. Things are either true or false (or mu I guess) according to the best of our knowledge. Further theorising is just metaphysical posturing.

Originally Posted by Boogster

I think my beef is really with our definition of 'rationality'. How do we (you) define it? Are moral decisions rational? Is love rational? To me, your logic as applied to ordinary situations seems to imply some kind of disconnected-ness that doesn't exist in actuality.
And aren't you pretty close to the naturalistic fallacy yourself in assuming all rational behaviour to be 'good' or correct?

To the extent that I have a moral outlook it would be the respecting of the independence of other intelligent beings. Rationality merely consists in applying it correctly. Obviously keeping to tradition is a moral outlook but it's nonsensical because you end up picking an arbitrary starting point for "tradition" and sticking to it.

'A logical argument is sometimes described as rational if it is logically valid. However, rationality is a much broader term than logic, as it includes "uncertain but sensible" arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience and the like, whereas logic deals principally with provable facts and demonstrably valid relations between them. For example, ad hominem arguments are logically unsound, but in many cases they may be rational.'

Do you agree?

Well this is more about the differences between deductive argument and inductive argument, and the extent to which the latter applies. Ad hominem arguments don't prove anything. As this is the point of an argument, ad hominem arguments are pretty shit ones.