Couple of days ago I saw a post about on atheist community about a quote saying atheist can’t base their morals on anything.

I commented that if religion didn’t accept some premises like god, they wouldn’t either. Some said I am wrong and downvoted me. So I decided to post here about to what extent can I be skeptical about premises, to see where I am mistaken (or commenters).

Before that post, for a while I had an idea that even the analytical truth/necessary truth (whatever you name it) like “a is equal to a” are premises which can not be proven (since they are the basics of our logic, which will we be in use to prove claims) even though they seem us to be true by intuition. They just have to be accepted to be able to further think about other things.

So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?

If I am mistaken, which is highly probable, please correct me and don’t judge. I am not much of a philosophy reader.

I would really appreciate it if you could share some resources (video, article, book, anything…) about limits of our understanding, logic, language and related topics.

Thanks in advance…

  • SmoothSurferOPEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I appreciate your effort to answer, but I couldn’t find the relevance of this with my question.

    Religion part is just how I ended up posting this. My question is:

    One of the great starting points in many fields, like science or philosophy is “I am probably wrong about many things — because I am unable to know everything, let’s see what I don’t know and put it to the test”

    Can I do this to analytical truths because when I do, I couldn’t find any claim to support them. I am clueless about, does our logic and reasoning correct?

    • somnuz
      2·
      11 months ago

      I thought your question was

      So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?

      not

      Can I do this to analytical truths because when I do, I couldn’t find any claim to support them. I am clueless about, does our logic and reasoning correct?

      — so for the first one, we might and often don’t understand the same thing from the same concepts, language often might be a limiting factor too.

      That’s why many fields, like in mathematics, physics or chemistry are using their own notation to simplify those concepts, then when you learn the rules of the notation there is this underlying premise that anyone with the same knowledge of those rules will read the written concept in the same way… H₂O or 2²=4

      — for the second, there are nice Quine’s criticisms in which he argues that the analytic–synthetic distinction is untenable.

      Summary (from wiki) of the argument: the notion of an analytic proposition requires a notion of synonymy, but establishing synonymy inevitably leads to matters of fact – synthetic propositions. Thus, there is no non-circular (and so no tenable) way to ground the notion of analytic propositions.

      • SmoothSurferOPEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Sorry about the confusion. I just have a lot in my mind about our capacity of understanding, so I just messed up a bit with asking right questions.

        I will do further research on mutual perception of concepts.

        And I will certainly be going to check out “Quine’s criticism” since it seems to suit my mindset and I like it just by doing preliminary research.

        Thanks