You are rediscovering an old discussion here. In the 12th century, al-Ghazali (soon known in Europe as "Algazel") wrote a work that promoted religion over reason in general (and Neoplatonism in particular), making, as far as I understand, exactly your argument. The work was called Tahāfut al-falasifa, "Incoherence of the philosophers". Ibn Rushd (soon known in Europe as "Averroes") wrote a reply titled Tahāfut at-tahāfut, "Incoherence of the incoherence". To the best of my meagre knowledge, the point goes like this:
If you attack reason by using reason, you're contradicting yourself.
If you attack reason without using reason, you're being unreasonable.
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With that out of the way, back to the actual topic. Can we blindly trust reason? Can we blindly trust anything?
We can't blindly trust reason, of course. It has happened again and again that a perfectly logical conclusion turned out to be wrong because it was drawn from insufficient or incorrect data.
The best we can do is the scientific method: the principle of parsimony. The harder it is to reconcile our logical conclusions with our observations of the hard facts of reality, the more likely it is that they are wrong. Absolute certainty cannot be had; very good certainty can be, sometimes, actually pretty often.
How reliable, then, are our observations? Do we actually observe anything, or are we (as you suggest) just hallucinating?
Here, too, absolute certainty cannot be had. Still, solipsism is highly unparsimonious: it requires the assumption that I have a vast and incredibly coherent imagination, an idea that is not congruent with any further evidence. Most likely, then, when different people and different instruments agree on a simple observation (like a measurement), they're not making it up.
I would like to discuss evolutionary epistemology, which explains why our senses are good at certain things and really bad at others (optical illusions for instance), but I don't have time to do this today; please tell me if you're interested.
Dr. David Marjanović
Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin
The opinions and conclusions expressed above probably reflect those of my institution, but I haven't asked.
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Gesendet: Montag, 08. Januar 2018 um 00:17 Uhr
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Betreff: [Sadhu Sanga] Can we trust reason ?