Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (31)

Rational scrutiny requires objective standards of rationality by which to judge whatever is being scrutinised.

But people disagree on what the basic principles of rationality are. A lot of people will point to, e.g. the laws of logic, yet all of the traditional laws of logic have been questioned. (For example, intuitionistic logic denies the law of the excluded middle, paraconsistent logic denies the law of non-contradiction, etc.)

How do we decide what is the correct standard of rationality? That is like asking, what is the correct standard of morality. If people disagree, there is no obvious way to resolve the disagreement. Is there a test or experiment or observation we could perform to determine whose rationality is the right one?

It seems that a materialist worldview has no room for objective morality; but if not, how does it have room for objective rationality either?

And if rationality is not objective, isn't rationality just whatever each person says it is? In which case the whole concept of "rational scrutiny" is a waste of time.

What about Alvin Plantinga's "reformed epistemology", where he adopts basic doctrines of his religion as basic principles of rationality? What is to stop any religion from doing that? If there are no objective standards of rationality, then each religion can adopt its own ones. But if there are objective standards, how do we know that the right ones are secular rather than religious?

I myself have views on faith similar, but not identical to Plantinga. To me, faith is by definition rational, since for me faith is a basic principle of rationality. However, I do apply various qualifications (which I won't go into here) to that idea, which avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls of that approach (but maybe not all pitfalls.)