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Originally Posted by peacegirl
Of course he had certain premises, and the premises had to be accurate to come to an accurate conclusion. So what you are saying is that you don't agree with his premises. That's okay, others will. Just because you don't agree doesn't make them wrong.
It is true that he inferred certain conclusions. That's what reasoning is Spacemonkey, but to say that he had presuppositions is wrong, and I'm not going to argue with you over this. If you want to hear the rest of his observations that led to his conclusions, great. If not, so be it.
His work presents no argument. He is showing that his premises based on accurate observations are correct, and his reasoning based on those premises is also accurate for that reason. You're correct in that what you believe were presuppositions is irrelevant because he had no presuppositions which you keep accusing him of. I wonder if you would argue with me if you knew I was Einstein's granddaughter? 
His conclusions require certain premises to be true, but they were not presuppositions. You're confusing his findings based on reality with your confused logic. You have no clue how conscience works, yet you continue to tell me that his findings are mere assertions. You're here for one reason only, and that is to show everyone how wonderful you are in comparison to Lessans.
He shared everything he observed. How would you know what he observed if you didn't read the second chapter in its entirety, or if you did you surely didn't understand it? Your synopsis is ridiculously incomplete. You don't even understand the first thing about two-sided equation, yet you act like your critique means something. You are like Nageli who rejected the very core of Mendel's discovery, and now Mendel is the father of genetics, and Nageli is a footnote. That's where you're headed. |
Ignoring your absurd ad hominem attacks here, you make a number of points which are false as a pure matter of definition. If his work had premises from which he reasoned his way to a conclusion, then his work presents an argument. That's just what an argument
is. He also could not have been
showing his premises to be true, because that would require
giving reasons for thinking them to be true, which (again by definition) would mean they were not in fact
premises but rather conclusions within his work.
And I'm not just saying that I don't happen to agree with his premises. I'm saying you haven't found a single person in nearly a decade of searching who does. Of course that doesn't prove them wrong, but it does show Lessans to have been a poor reasoner. Good reasoning does not begin from premises that most people will reject. And most (actually all) people have rejected his premises. If he was as insightful as he thought he was, he would have known that people would need to be given reasons to agree with his account of conscience. Reasons which he just didn't give us.
And you still aren't answering my questions. With respect to these points...
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That conscience consists of a standard of rightness and wrongness which in and of itself is:
1) Innate.
2) Universal.
3) God-given.
4) Perfectly infallible when not corrupted.
5) Defeasible only by practices of blame and punishment which facilitate blame-shifting (and some other unspecified factors) which are not an integral aspect of the development and proper functioning of conscience.
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...do you agree or disagree that:
(i) These things have to be true for the conclusions of his book to be true?
(ii) He did not argue for or support these things anywhere within his book?
Because when I say that these were
presuppositions of his work, all I mean is that they have to be true for his non-discovery to be valid, and that he didn't give any reasons for thinking that they are true. And you don't seem to be disagreeing with me on either of these points. Rather, you just seem to be having an emotional reaction to the word 'presupposition'.
It is a further issue whether or not he could have 'observed' the truth of his necessary premises by some kind of revelation or direct intuition, rather than having to infer them on the basis of what would have to be unshared properly
observational (i.e. particular and non-general) facts. But that is a tangential issue at this point, for none of this would provide anyone here with any reason to accept or agree with those points I have listed above as presuppositions. And that means no-one has any reason to consider his first non-discovery to be valid.