To someone who says that the rules of logic ought function like I trump I’d merely ask why. It seems to me that the burden of proof is on them. And it’s not an easy thing to answer. (As, I think, common trumps are hard to justify – which is as good a reason to highlight the problem as any) It’s akin to mathematics being taken as the ultimate subject for years before someone starting noting first the lack of philosophical foundations and then (with Goedel) some of the problematic foundations. I think this is true with logic as well. Logic as often used entails metaphysical commitments that are anything but obvious. (Reminds me of Heidegger’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic)

There are things that people are dogmatic about (materialism, god, causality, etc.) that they really ought not be. To me the biggest value of philosophy is in bringing the problems and complexities to light. That is philosophy ought get us to discard our trump holding.

To your last point about pragmatism. I think that a Rationalist (say Leibniz) has to justify his Rationalism. To the degree that he can’t think I think he’s being unreasonable. One can debate how far they go but I think one has to agree that on key issues Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza make some key assumptions that are anything but obvious.

Are they being rational? Well I suppose that depends upon how they react were someone to question them on the topic. I suspect at least some of the assumptions were more blind spots than trumps.

Again, fair enough, but my point wasn’t about your view but about whether others are unreasonable if they effectively treat them as such. I know you don’t think these are trumps; that’s been pretty obvious from the beginning. But my point here, as always, has been that it is a different and far, far more difficult thing to show that others are unreasonable if they take things like these as trumps. Alan’s original argument, as far as I can see, collapsed into sheer incoherence; different interpretations of it by others than Alan ended up being mutually exclusive and not, as far as I can see, much better; and while there may be, as you suggest, reasons for people of broadly pragmatist sympathies to reject trumps, there doesn’t appear to be any knock-down argument against someone who wants to say that (say) the law of noncontradiction should function as a trump — they just can’t be broadly pragmatist, which a very great many people won’t be on a point like this. They’ll tend rationalist, at least in their sympathies; and rationalists, as they ever have, will regard reasoning well as giving the right, at least if certain conditions are met, to be vigorously dogmatic about what reasoning has reached. And there is nothing inconsistent or unreasonable about this, even if it turns out that the pragmatists are right and the rationalists wrong.