DIALECTIC AND BASIC THINKING:
THE FUNDAMENT OF BEING

TRULY EDUCATED

© 2005 by Orchid Land Publications

[20070512, rev. 20070917, 20080808]

     I repeat the beginning of another webpage no the orlapubs.com website:  Another page of this website begins:  The writer recently heard on the media:  "Some are bothered by the fact that it will be changed next year" or the semantic equivalent.  This incomprehensible use of "fact" for something that has not taken place is not as rare among those who claim to be educated as one might guess, at least not in my experience.  (I could cite an example from a book by a famous scholar who makes a surmise and subsequently refers to it as "the fact that . . ")  Some readers are so addicted to advertisements that they seem to have lost the distinction between what an ad claims to be the case, in the sense of being an existing fact, and what is actually so.  Worse is what happens in conversations with "educated" persons that describe something derived from a private premise (an assumption or axiom) not shared by one's readers as "therefore true" or "therefore false."  But since a premise, assumption, or axiom is simply posited or assumed―it is not factually "true" . . . . or false, though it defines for those accepting the surmise what is true and what is false. 

One should be careful to say, "IF the premise X accepted, then it follows that whatever follows from the premise is true and whatever conflicts with it is false."  The only cognitively honest way of coming to a conclusion is to look at the axioms of the paradigms of both sides of a controversial issue.  Debating is beneficial where a team has got to offer reasons to defend or attack a proposition, however the lot may fall, regardless of debater's own private views.

     A reasonable person tests the validity of a premise by checking whether the data that  it inherently predicts correspond to the inherent prediction or not.  Once the premise has been validated to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in a conversation, they can agree that x (which agrees with the premise X) is true or―if it does not harmonize with the premise, that the premise is likely to be false, but at all events is not clearly true.  In instances in which it is not easy to determine whether a statement or belief agrees with or clashes with a premise accepted by the interlocutors in a discussion, its truth or falsity has to be left in the realm of what is uncertain.

     Someone (who should have known better) recently informed me of the would-be "fact" that newborns are guilty of Adam's sinning.  This entails a view that the guilt of sinning―which is a matter of the will, since erring when one thinks one is doing the right thing is not culpable―devolves on those who had no part in the Adam's willing what he did.  Of course, one might be born into the ontic state―say the deprivation of Grace―that the first sin resulted in . . . but that involves no sin or guilt on the latter's part.¹   The endurance of such a logical error over the ages

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     ¹In the LXX or Greek Old Testament, around a millennium older than the oldest Massoretic Hebrew text (unless it has turned up in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which agree with the LXX where it differs from the Massoretic text, as in the available scrolls of Isaias), humans were created according to the icon or image of God and according to the Assimilation (to the divine).  The translators knew the difference between being like and making like (assimilating) as clearly as speakers of English know the difference between being soft and softening (making soft).

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is staggering.  My interlocutor quoted Scripture in his defence, but failed to distinguish hamartía (a state or condition of deprivation resulting from sinning) from hamártēma and hence translated both as "sin" in the manner of Western Bible translators.  Many paradigm-caused² confusions between terms

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      ²Since the form and matter of a paradigm are both constituted out of axioms, one might just as well say "axiom-determined."  For examples, go to http://www.orlapubs.com/AR/R265-X.html.

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that in Hellenistic and Apostolic Greek and in Eastern Christianity have ontic import but (for easily recountable historical reasons) have volitional-moral (deontic) or juridical import among Western Christians). 

    An error slightly different from the foregoing is to ignore that groups and individuals are different, as in a document recently noticed on some website:  Love your race!  Yet all members of that race or any other are not uniformly good or bed.  Race is not like butter, whose subvarieties differ only trivially.  While this error is more prevalent among the uneducated, it is the educated that just as easily succumb to "proving" or "disproving" propositions on the basis of assumptions or axioms that are not true or false and, when not those of the person one is discussing a matter with, pointless rather than probative.  When discussions take place among those of different axiomatic paradigms, the proper way to argue is in these terms:

If  we premise X, then it follows that Y is true and Z cannot be true.

     To get around the relativism of this approach, the following modification would seem acceptable.  In

circles that treat "the" New Testament as divine revelation.  One could accept as decisive

that if the Apostle Paul (or some other author) wrote Z
with the ontic import that it* conveyed in his time and place,
not with the juridical import of later writers in the West,
then such and such follows.

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     *I refer to Paul's 26 usages of energy words--as modish in his day as quotations from existentialist philosophers and theologians were in the early sixties of the last century.. 

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     Another problem to be dealt with is misleading notion of "the" Bible.  Western Bibles grossly mistranslate at times.  They not only fail to understand that THE crucial distinction between IMAGE and ASSIMILATION of Genesis 1:26 respectively refers to human essence and the (energetic) nature mentioned in 2 Peter 1:4.  Not only does the Genesis narration justify the immoral notion (rejected more than once in the Old Testament) that sons do not inherit the sins of their fathers; the lack of a distinction means that the Peter passage can only be understood in terms of participating in the divine ESSENCE:  This being impossible, various non-literal senses have to be invented for "the" Bible.  The conflict between Grace and works that has agitated Western Christians since Augustine would not exist if energy were correctly read in Phlp. 2:13, whose two mentions of energizing clearly indicate synergizing, also part of Christian teaching ─divine Energy energizes a worshiper's energy to please God.   When the words for energy, energize are mistranslated as "work," not only is the causative idea lost; what one reads is not "the" Bible.  Of course, many other passages that self-avowed literalists (the opposite of traditionalists) cannot accept literally (esp. in John 6) undermine the idea of literal fidelity.

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     The ancient Greeks taught dialectic in every phase of education.  So how would you teach second- or third-graders how to distinguish a premise from a statement whose truth depends on a given premise?  It is no doubt easier to distinguish a group from the varied individuals that constitute many groups.  As for premises, however, I suppose that one would start with the premise that mice are small rats or that the universe is flat or that nothing exists outside of the world.  Perhaps it could be shown that no counterevidence about the spherical shape of the earth or a Creator could possibly be true.  The last might get a teacher into trouble, however.  The opposite premise that the earth is spherical would mean that all counterevidence to earth's general flatness would have to be a mirage.   If one premised that everything has got to have an ultimate cause (not in an endless regression), then a Creator of a different kind of (uncaused) world must accept. Then there are premises about time . . . but that gets into the muddy waters of evolution, but which anti-traditionalist radicals reject while the traditinalist Greek tradition accepts.  I leave it to elementary school teachers to work out the method.

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     The history of Spain is important for understanding the end of the Western Dark Ages, not to speak of the discovery and exploration of many parts of the Western Hemisphere, notably the parts where the Spanish language is widespread and the cultural medium.  (Whether Basque Iberia is related to Iberia in the Caucasus is something that this writer is not competent to comment on.)  Spain, at least in the South, became Islamic under Baghdad in 756, though the Umayyads took control in 756 when they were driven out of Damaskós.  Historically important is the ancient Province of Andalus and, among the cities, Cadiz (Tarshish) and Córdova, not to speak of Granada from 1238, after the decline of Córdova, begun in 1198, capital of Andalus.   Granada did not fall to Castille under Ferdinand and Isabella until 1492.  These historical facts are important for the imprint they have left on Westrn intellectual aradigms, especially those of Latin Catholics and Reformation Protestants. 
     Spain has underwgone two Semitic phases―one under Punic Carthage, one later under North African Muslim régimes.  In between, there was the Roman hegemony―in complete control of Spain by the beginning of the A.D. epoch.  From the very early fifth century, Germanic tribes overran Spain, the Franks prevailing in the early sixth century.  In 554 the Byzantines conquered Spain and left the Greek mark on the Spanish sound system.  (Contrast the more French-like Portuguese sounds.)  The West Goths reconquered Spain in 711 and established their capital at Toledo―later to become, like Sicily, bilingual under the Muslims and non-Muslims.  The Umayyad Muslims were tolerant of Jews and even of Christians.  (Contrast later Spanish and Portuguese auto da fes in the name of [Western] Christianity!!)
     The importance of Spain and Sicily for the West lies in the way the great culture of Islam (which invented alcohol, algebra, etc.) brought an end to the Dark Ages, a Western European phenomenon, through Latin translations of Arabic philosophy―itself based on translations of Greek philosophy and culture made in 800 AD at Damaskós, i.e. half a century after the death of St. John of Damaskós 800 AD at Damaskós―into Latin made by bilinguals in Sicily and Toledo (among whom was the interestingly named Herman the German; Spanish wrote Germanic "h" as "g").  This will-based, or juridically formed, culture had reached its apogee in 1198 when the Moorish army revolted, an event that led to the fleeing of scholars (including famous Muslim scholars like Ibn Rush [Averroës] and Jewish scholars like Ben Maimon [Maimonides]) to flee to Northern Africa―via Acre in the case of Ben Maimon, who became physician to the most famous Muslim, Sal-ad-Din, a Kurd who conquered Jerusalem from the Latins.  The Arab regime of Sicily fell to the Norman/Vikings in 1060 and in 1139 became part of the the Norman/Viking Kingdom of Naples (where Thomas Aquinas was born; cf. the Norman/Vikings at Oxford, where Aquinas's opponents, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, began their academic careers).  Roger II's brilliant court in Sicily was instrumental in the transfer of Muslim culture to Western Europe―which had always been juridically (forensically) formed as the result of the orientation of the founders of Western Christianity ―Tertullian, Cyprian, and, above all, Augustine―all born in and resident in the ex-Punic (Semitic) Province of Carthage.  (It was Roman in their day.)  (This was quite different from the energy form of Eastern Christianity; cf. Paul's 26 uses of "energy.")

     An adjunct to dialectic connecting the dots.  As I deal with this elsewhere, I here mention only the facility, natural for some but hard to learn for others, of lining up items of a class horizontally and in separate rows inserting the corresponding functions or the like of each, so that the vertical columns parallel one another the way the horizontal columns do: