Russell Hasan's Blog

Reasoning works by means of thinking along a line of reasoning. A line of reasoning is a line where each point in the line is a reason-computation that takes the conclusions from the previous point as that point’s premises, reasons what must be true if all those premises are true, forms conclusions, and then hands off those conclusions to the next point in the line to be the premises for the next point. Lines of reasoning prove things, but lines of reasoning must have their premises checked, especially if the conclusion turns out to be false or to resolve to a contradiction. To check a line of reasoning, you start at the conclusion and work your way back up to the start, confirming that each premise which was reasoned from was correct, and a key task is to look for hidden premises, things which were assumed for the analysis without awareness or without conscious thought and deliberation choosing to accept those premises before they were adopted. Assumptions, or what you take for grante...

Thesis: A moral defense of capitalism. Premises: 1. Each thing is a thing. A thing is something, a thing is itself, and a thing is what it is. A thing is a thing in itself, a thing as such. Each thing has a nature, as what it is. The nature of a thing is the set of principles which explain how and why it is what it is and how and why it behaves as it does. Every thing has a nature, although the specific nature of a thing is subject to the specific domain to which it belongs, for example, science, math, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, etc. This understanding of the general nature of things is metaphysics. A thing’s nature can be studied and analyzed and known by reason and logic. The human mind observes things, and infers general principles from those things, and then applies those principles to other things, and, because knowledge is general and abstract and not limited to specifics, it covers cases outside of the immediate awareness or perception of the one who knows. This ...