Logic: the Instrument of Knowledge

When I attended high school I heard many discussions and arguments in the classroom, in assemblies and in the Shortridge Senate. What bothered me most was that I would hear arguments on one side of an issue that sounded good and arguments on the other side, which also sounded good. To some extent, I realized I simply needed more information, but the question, which really concerned me, was, "How do you get to the bottom of a question?"

The answer was to be able to distinguish between sound arguments and fallacies. So when I attended Duke University, I took a good thorough course in logic. To my surprise, I discovered that most logical concepts are little more difficult than arithmetic. It is fairly simple to add up a column of figures and get the right answer. It is almost equally easy to spot logical fallacies and determine whether an argument is valid or not. Though Parmenides (515-440BC) and Plato (427-347BC) were important pioneers, it is Aristotle (384-322BC) who really established the science of logic. He articulated it as "The Organon" or the instrument of knowledge. So it was very widely understood until irrationalist 20th Century with its dissolution of the university and its anti-philosophical ideologies and just plain superstitions.

What is important to understand about logic can be dealt with briefly under three headings. First that "definition" is essential to a disciplined and intelligent discussion. One often finds such weasel words as "authoritarian" used by people. Does this mean "having genuine authority" or "a pretense to authority which is unjustified"? One thinks of Lewis Carroll, the logician who spent a lot of time laughing at our loose, sloppy ways of saying things in Alice in Wonderland and the Hunting of the Shark. Definition controls? Can one species evolve into another? First of all, what is a species? Socrates' tireless exposure of such sloppy thinking earned him the hemlock.

Second, the study and analysis of the syllogism is the key to understanding the heart of logic. This is the formalization of argument into a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. For example:
"All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man,
Therefore Socrates is mortal."
The validity (or falsity) of a conclusion is something we can know for sure. By changing the major premise or the minor premise we can invalidate the conclusion. "Aha! Socrates isn't a man, actually he's an angel" or "the men on Altair IV are just as human as we are but they are immortal." Well, if either of these propositions were true, it would invalidate the conclusion.

Significantly, people don't often speak in syllogisms but if you unpack what they say, you will find it. "Bob, your father told you to mow the lawn." One sentence. This translates into:
Your father told you to mow the lawn.
If you don't do it there will be bad consequences.
Therefore, to avoid the bad consequences, mow the lawn.
This is also like "Freeze!" which unpacks to:
If I move I'll be shot.
I don't want to be shot,
So I won't move.
People make these connections intuitively; the study of logic lays bare the underlying structure. Logic does for the mind, what time and motion studies do for the workplace.

Finally, there are anywhere from 40 to 115 logical fallacies. Usually, they have a technical name such as "the ad hominum fallacy" (attack the man). Sometimes they are expressed as popular designations, such as "mixing apples with oranges," "the tail wagging the dog," "the cart pulling the horse" and "the refusal to discuss"-- anything relevant to a topic that is embarrassing to one's position. And there are many more. Knowledge of these is like the tilt sign on a pinball machine. It almost instantly warns us that something is wrong. Logic can be considered a codification of intellectual honesty. One can say two plus two equals five, but no one can seriously believe it because it is intellectual dishonesty. Much of illogic is simply a form of denial, like the man who said "You'll never convince me that abortion is anything more than scraping some tissue from a woman's uterus," an assertion totally refuted by one glimpse of an ultrasound.

Society today is beginning to diverge into two cultures: on the one hand the emotional and irrational culture, which refuses to look at factual information contradicting their position; on the other, various forms of conservatism, which insist that the real is rational and the rational is real, that facts really count, and that objective moral principles are not just a matter of opinion.

It is interesting that there has been a revival of interest in the study of logic in schools and universities, inspired in part by Dorothy L. Sayer's essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning."

Source:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6048828/The-Lost-Tools-of-Learning

Previously published on Associated Content.

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