[Vision2020] News Article, Mental Illness, Fixation of Belief Discussion

[Thomas Hansen]

Correction:  And this is important to "us" on the Vision2020 listserve
because . . . ?

Tom Hansen

-----Original Message-----
From: Art Deco [mailto:deco@moscow.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 9:15 AM
To: vision2020@moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] News Article, Mental Illness, Fixation of
Belief Discussion


Re:  Immutable Laws of Logic?

It may surprise you but some of the those conventions called the laws of
logic have changed.  Parts of Aristotle's class logic was found to be in
error by George Boole (the assumption that a defined class has a member
implicit in one of Aristotle's argument testing rules).  Other more advanced
concepts in the restricted predicate calculus and unrestricted predicate
calculus have been advanced and changed in the last 150 years, e.g. Gödel's
Proof.  Like science, logic does advance by rooting out false statements
and/or discovering new truths.  While it is not immutable, it is the best we
have now.

The grammar of a language does change.  However, the notion of what
constitutes a believing in contradiction, e.g., believing in a statement and
its negation at the same time does not appear to have changed since the
earliest recorded writings as far as I can tell.  What also appears not to
have changed is that the mentally ill and the religious (partial
redundancy?) sometimes do not recognize a contradiction as a deterrent to
belief in a creed.

If some fool wants to believe in a creed that contains contradictory
statements, there is nothing anyone can logically do to stop them.

In the secular world such persons are often referred for treatment if the
consequences of their contradictory beliefs reach a certain level of danger
to society.  Treatment is many times successful.  In the religious world
less alarm is raised by contradictory creeds unless the consequences are
like those which came from Jim Jones, David Koresh, et al.  Treatment of
religious delusions have a much lower success rate than treatment of secular
delusions.  (Brian Mitchell is one example.)  The treatment rate is lower
because a fantasy is impossible to disprove with finality.  Despite there
being no unequivocal evidence, some still believe that there are real
unicorns or leprechauns.

There is a newer logic -- fuzzy logic.  The same basic logical conventions
apply to fuzzy that have always applied, except that the properties defining
class membership is allowed to be less precise than that in the stricter
predicate calculi -- as such properties are in ordinary language with its
vagueness and ambiguity.

You can call me narrow minded.  Possibly true.  But I am willing to consider
any set of non-contradictory non-meta-lingual statements as a possible
belief.  (Meta-lingual and mixed sets are more complicated.)  Of the
infinite number of such sets, most are rejected on the basis of evidence.
Some are left as pending possibilities depending future evidence.  Some are
conditionally accepted given present evidence.  I submit that such an
attitude is much more open minded  and mentally healthy than that which you
appear to espouse.  I agree that the universe is very complicated.  I submit
that those sharing my view have done infinitely more to forward the
understanding of  those complexities that those who believe that a set of
statements containing a contradiction is an acceptable belief.

My weakness in your eyes is that I cannot "stretch" myself to believe in
positions that contain contradictory statements.  But to do so would be
delusional -- one form of mental illness.  Apparently you have no such
reservations.  If you did, the belief system you so zealously push and in
which you seem to have such a powerful, blinding ego involvement would be
greatly altered.

Many children have imaginary playmates or imaginary friends with various
desirable attributes, that they sometimes think of as real, and to whom they
"talk" to for various reasons.  Most outgrow these delusions.  If they
don't, they are considered mentally ill.  The same situation is
indistinguishable from belief in of Santa Claus, Mother Goose, the Easter
Bunny, and alleged gods.

Again, let state the obvious in hopefully clear language.  I do not believe
in any set of statements which contain or from which can be internally
derived a given statement and its negation -- a contradiction.

If you do believe in such sets of statements as possible beliefs, then admit
it.  (And please do not rejoin with the view that certain objects are beyond
the pale of language then contradict yourself by talking about them.)

In that case those, if any, who are following this discussion can decide for
themselves which point of view is likely to be true.


Did you sleep through the History of Philosophy?  I am not a rationalist but
an empiricist.  Rationalists were those that believed in immutable truths
discoverable by logical processes as opposed to observational processes
(prone, unfortunately to error) alone.


Wayne Fox