How does one justify reason without reason? Isn’t this just circular reasoning— circular logic? Can one justify reason without employing reason? Can there be logic without reason?
The Age of Enlightenment is simultaneously the Age of Reason. Reason is the best path forward, and yet one can’t even board the train without a predisposition toward reason at the start.
This reminds me of the troubles the logical positivists encountered by claiming that everything need to be falsifiable, and yet this claim could not be falsified. It’s Hume’s ought problem.
One could employ empiricism, but can one arrive there alogically?
Is there a term for ‘not logical’ without the same baggage as illogical?
- Alogical
- Antilogical
- Contralogical
- Counterlogical
- Delogical
- Dislogical
- Inlogical
- Mislogical
- Nonlogical
- Oblogical
- Unlogical
For example, a work of art is not (necessarily) logical, but neither is it illogical; this feels like improper usage. So, what prefix modifier would one employ to communicate ‘not within the sphere of logic’ in shorthand? Or is it just ‘not logical‘. That doesn’t seem quite right either.
Clearly, shambling down some rabbit hole…
Philosophics 
Maybe “reason” is only assumed to identify a single thing. That this idea of a single thing that is reason is a theological ideal of a particular protocol of knowledge-power.
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…protocol in the a methodologal sense of ‘it makes sense’. Not protocol as a method that uses a ‘common sense’.
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Reason is a ‘to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic‘, so logic is a necessary constituent and logic is ‘reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity‘, so even the dictionary definitions are circular. Or at least, logic is a particular form of reason. Is their a non-logical form of reasoning? As you suggest, I can arrive at an outcome without employing logic. This goes back to Kahneman’s systems I and II, where logic is processed in system II. Finding my car keys in the morning does not require logic. I just know where I put them. I can create a presumed logical model of this event, but that would not capture or reflect what really happens. And there is a method, but it’s heuristic rather than logic.
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