Knowledge

is reason infallible? can reason alone help us understand everything about all aspects of humanity and life?

Comments

Your questions are so terse that I can't be confident I'm interpreting them as you intended. But I'm inclined to answer them "Yes" and "Yes."

If by "reason" you mean "deductively valid reasoning," then reason is infallible in the sense that it's guaranteed never to lead us from truth to falsity. Even so, however, we're fallible in our use of reason: we can think that some bit of reasoning is deductively valid and be mistaken about that (within limits: some reasoning is so basic that it would make no sense to think we could be mistaken about its validity). Still, deductive reasoning differs from other ways of forming beliefs in that when it's properly employed it can't lead us into error.

Can reason alone help us understand everything? Yes, with emphasis on help. We can apply deductive reasoning to the inputs we get from our senses, from introspection, from memory, from our traffic in concepts, etc., to see what those inputs imply, to see what their content is, to understand them better. It's not as though there's some faculty other than reason that does a better job of improving our understanding.

Read another response by Stephen Maitzen

Read another response about Knowledge