Thoughts Continued

In my last post, I divided all of our sources of knowledge into three categories: experience, reason, and authority. I then discussed how experience works to give us knowledge about the world. I would now like to move to 'reason'.

Reason or logic is a method for discovering knowledge or truths about the world that is fundamentally an enterprise of the mind. It begins with some fact or axiom or assumption and based on these starting points attempts to draw conclusions about the world. It is a way of linking together information so that other information is revealed. Reason and logic may take slightly different forms but all those forms possess a similar structure. A man first states a proposition or multiple propositions. This proposition is presented as reason or evidence for the truthfulness of another proposition which in turn is meant to provide reason or evidence for third proposition. This process continues until a particular conclusion is reached. 

A syllogism is one form that this process can take that was very popular among the ancient Greek philosophers. A syllogism might be structured something like this:

                                   All men are mortal

                                   Socrates is a man.

                                   Therefore, Socrates is mortal. 

Reason was held to be especially important in discovering truth for the ancient Greeks. They found little use for studying the physical world as a means to gain knowledge but rather relied heavily on the process of logical reasoning to discover truths about the world. The Platonic concepts of ideal forms surely played a role in why this was the case. The forms that they were seeking to understand were not physical and therefore not available to be scrutinized under a microscope (assuming they had invented microscopes). 

Reason as a primary means of discovering truth was also very popular during the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages and during the Enlightenment. Rene Descartes is famous for his statement, “I think, therefore, I am.” In this statement he was attempting to find a proposition that could not possibly be doubted so that he could then begin to lay claim to the veracity of other truths arrived at through the process of reason.