I don’t think it’s possible to have unmotivated reasoning. Nearly all reasoning begins by assuming a set of propositions, such as axioms, to be true, before following all the implications. If I believe objectivity is true, then I want to know what follows from it. Note that Cox’s theorem proceeds similarly, by forming a set of desiderata first, and then finding a set of rules that satisfies them. Do you not consider this chain of reasoning to be valid?
(If I strongly believed “life is meaningless” to be false, and I believed that “God does not exist implies life is meaningless” then concluding from those that God exists is logically valid. Whether or not the two first propositions are themselves valid is another question)
There’s motivation and there’s motivation. Bad motivation is when an object-level proposition is taken as the necessary output of an epistemological process, and the epistemology is chose to beg the question. Good motivation is avoiding question-begging in your epistemology.
One thing about that chain of reasoning is that it’s very unbayesian. We have catch-phrases like “0 and 1 aren’t probabilities”. Even if they are, how do you get your 1 as probability for the thesis of objectivity being true?
I don’t think it’s possible to have unmotivated reasoning. Nearly all reasoning begins by assuming a set of propositions, such as axioms, to be true, before following all the implications. If I believe objectivity is true, then I want to know what follows from it. Note that Cox’s theorem proceeds similarly, by forming a set of desiderata first, and then finding a set of rules that satisfies them. Do you not consider this chain of reasoning to be valid?
(If I strongly believed “life is meaningless” to be false, and I believed that “God does not exist implies life is meaningless” then concluding from those that God exists is logically valid. Whether or not the two first propositions are themselves valid is another question)
There’s motivation and there’s motivation. Bad motivation is when an object-level proposition is taken as the necessary output of an epistemological process, and the epistemology is chose to beg the question. Good motivation is avoiding question-begging in your epistemology.
One thing about that chain of reasoning is that it’s very unbayesian. We have catch-phrases like “0 and 1 aren’t probabilities”. Even if they are, how do you get your 1 as probability for the thesis of objectivity being true?