Logics. The law of sufficient reason and its role in cognition (the most important)

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Logics. The law of sufficient reason and its role in cognition (the most important)

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7. THE LAW OF Sufficient Reason and Its Role in Cognition

The requirement of proof, the validity of thought expresses the law of sufficient reason: every thought is recognized as true if it has a sufficient basis. If there is b, then there is also its base a.

A person's personal experience can be a sufficient basis for thoughts. The truth of some judgments is confirmed by their direct comparison with the facts of reality. So, for a person who witnessed a crime, the justification for the truth of the proposition "N. committed a crime" will be the very fact of the crime, of which he was an eyewitness. But personal experience is limited. Therefore, a person in his activity has to rely on the experience of other people, for example. on the testimony of eyewitnesses of an event. Such grounds are usually resorted to in investigative and judicial practice in the investigation of crimes.

Thanks to the development of scientific knowledge, a person is increasingly using the experience of all mankind as the basis of his thoughts, enshrined in the laws and axioms of science, in the principles and provisions that exist in any field of human activity.

The truth of laws, axioms has been confirmed by the practice of mankind and therefore does not need new confirmation. To confirm any particular case, it is not necessary to substantiate it with the help of personal experience. If, for example, we know the law of Archimedes, then there is no point in proving it. The law of Archimedes will be a sufficient basis for confirming any particular case.

Thanks to science, which in its laws and principles consolidates the socio-historical practice of mankind, in order to substantiate our thoughts, we do not each time resort to checking them, but justify them logically, by deriving from already established provisions.

In this way, a sufficient basis for any thought can be any other, already verified and established thought, from which the truth of this thought necessarily follows.

If the truth of proposition a implies the truth of proposition b, then a will be the reason for b, and b the consequence of this reason.

Validity - the most important property of logical thinking. In all cases when we affirm something, convince others of something, we must prove our judgments, give sufficient reasons confirming the truth of our thoughts. This is the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking, which is characterized by lack of evidence, the ability to accept various positions and dogmas on faith.

The law of sufficient reason is incompatible with various prejudices and superstitions. It is of great theoretical and practical importance. Fixing attention on the judgments that justify the truth of the put forward provisions, this law helps to separate the true from the false and come to the right conclusion.

Any conclusion of the court or investigation must be substantiated. In the materials concerning any case, containing, for example, the assertion of the guilt of the accused, there must be data that is a sufficient basis for the accusation.

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Psychologists from the University of Pittsburgh tried to address both of these objections: their statistics cover data on the psychological state of almost 1 people aged 800 to 19 who used the 32 most popular social Internet services (the aforementioned Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Snapchat plus Reddit, Tumblr , Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and LinkedIn).

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