What logic is, and what it isn't
Aug. 6th, 2008 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
majutsukaiSo, I haplessly stumbled upon the colossal, mind-boggling time-waster that is StumbleUpon today. (Pun not intended in the slightest. I seriously could not think of another verb to use in that damn sentence. X-x)
I wouldn't be calling it a time-waster if it weren't fun; if it were boring, I wouldn't waste my time with it. But it did get me thinking about something, and put me in the mood for a nice rant. So YOU, my lovely little captive audience, get the privilege of coming along for the ride.
Okay. So, among my StumbleUpon interests, I have "Logic" listed. It was one of my favorite class subjects in school, and a topic that I tend to find intensely engaging. So, yeah, fun, clicking the button on the toolbar would occasionally give me a cool logic-related site to occupy my mind with for five to ten minutes. Cool stuff.
Then I discovered the StumbleVideo function. Wasted some time with that for a while in a way largely similar to what I had done with the websites. But then I noticed that you could filter the results based on interest tags. I tried that a couple times, finding some pretty cool linguistics- or philosophy-related videos to watch for a while. Then, I tried Logic.
Dear lord. I am dumbstruck at the things that people will mark as being related to logic. From videos of people playing some kind of keyboard-like instrument to an old lady whacking the hood of a car and causing the airbag to deploy-- well, those were some of the more nonsensical results, which don't really have anything to do with what I'm ranting about, but were weird and unrelated enough that I felt like mentioning them.
*COUGH*. Anyways. There were a few results that made me groan and slap my forehead at the fact that people had marked them as related to logic. Examples: 9/11 conspiracy theorists, clips from a sitcom called "Big Bang Theory" (Basically a show made so that "normal" people could point and laugh at how nerdy the main characters are), political debates/monologues, videos on string theory and other physics-related topics, etc.
Now, all this really does is serve to underscore something I had already realized about people when they talk about "logic"-- namely, that hardly anybody seems to know what the fuck logic actually is. (Now, with science, I'll admit that one can possibly draw a connection. But any connection between logic and string theory is most likely a bit tenuous, at best.)
When people talk about using "logic", I notice, what they actually mean tends to fall into one of a few distinct categories. Optimistically, what people mean when they say "logic" is, very often, "critical thinking". Critical thinking definitely plays a large part in logic, but they are not one and the same. Still, if you are using critical thinking, even in lieu of true logic, it's a badge of honor in your name as far as I'm concerned. You've got the proverbial baby in the bathwater.
Regressing to the next level down on the optimism scale brings us to where we tend to find YouTube commenters a good 95%+ of the time, and general forum-dwellers a not-much-more-optimistic 75%. To wit: "Stuff that makes sense (to me)". People who cite things like "We can't have evolved from monkeys, because then why are there still monkeys?" as being "logic" are a clear example of this. (If anybody reading this thinks this is a logical argument, and would like it explained why I think it isn't, I'd be glad to oblige; however, being the optimistic little chum I am when it comes to the faculties of reason of the friends I hold near and dear, I'm going to assume I needn't waste my breath.)
The next level down, "Sciencey stuff", is last I can really be bothered to think of at the moment. Reserved for those who don't even really expend any thought towards the meaning of "logic" (not even to get it wrong), there really isn't much that can be said about this category.
So when am I going to stop acting like a pompous prick and actually explain what logic means? No time like the present, I say.
Now, the field of philosophy is obviously one in which a lot of ideas get thrown around. At some point, the ancient greeks decided that they needed a system to pick the good ones out from the bad ones. From this was born the simple, yet powerful idea that the conclusion of an argument must unequivocally and necessarily follow from its premises. That is to say, if you accept a certain proposition as true, then you must accept what follows from that proposition. For instance, take the classic example:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
If you accept statements one and two, you are all but forced to accept the conclusion, statement three. Arguments needn't be so obvious as this, but this is just a useful example. An argument is said to be "valid" if its conclusion follows from its premises, and "sound" if its premises can also be demonstrated to be true.
Now, obviously there's more to it than all that, but I'm not going to talk your ear off here; that's a good enough basic understanding. (If I somehow didn't satiate your TL;DR hunger, you can check out the Wikipedia article for some more in-depth info. Fascinating read, but then, I usually find wikipedia to be such, colossal dork that I am.)
As a special bonus with the "good logic" package, as described above, the field of logic also lets you learn to spot bad logic, or what we call logical fallacies. Basically, fallacies are bad arguments that can, with varying levels of success, trick people into thinking that they're good arguments.
Let's take an if/then statement. "If A, then B". (This can also be worded "A implies B"). If we assert that A is true, then by that statement, B must be true too. But what about if we assert that B is true? Does that mean that A is true?
Nnnnope. This is a fallacy called "Affirming the consequent", a formal fallacy that's probably one of the easiest to spot. To put it in perspective, let's replace A and B with actual statements: "If an animal is a cat, then it is furry. My dog is furry. Therefore, my dog is a cat."
Seems pretty hard to fall for when you put it like that. But it can get a bit more muddled when you're dealing with issues less cut-and-dried. To wit: "It has been scientifically proven that watching TV has a negative effect on grades. Grades have dropped steadily over the past five years. Therefore, children are watching too much TV." They can get even trickier than that, but I'm sure you understand by now what to watch out for.
Then, there are informal fallacies. These are FAR more common than formal fallacies, like the one above. For example:
"Bob never lies. I know this because Bob told me so, and since Bob is such an honest person, I've no choice but to believe him."
This is known as "Circular logic", also called "begging the question". Basically, the arguer asks you to accept as a premise (begs) the conclusion that he/she is trying to prove (the question).
A very important thing to understand, though, is that an argument being invalid does NOT mean its conclusion is untrue. Bob may be honest, and children may be watching too much TV. Those conclusions, though, don't follow from their premises in the arguments I've presented, so we can't say they're true based on those arguments.
The two main modes of debunking an argument with logic are identifying fallacy, and identifying contradiction. A contradictory argument, in logic, is one from which you can derive a statement with the format: "A and Not A". Or, basically, "A is true, and A is false".
But I'm getting too rambly here. The point is, THIS is the sort of stuff that logic is.
I think I've proven, by way of sheer TL;DR-ness, how fascinated I am with this subject; so while I won't jump down someone's throat over it, I at least eyetwitch when people bandy about the word "logic" without having any idea of what it actually means.
I wouldn't be calling it a time-waster if it weren't fun; if it were boring, I wouldn't waste my time with it. But it did get me thinking about something, and put me in the mood for a nice rant. So YOU, my lovely little captive audience, get the privilege of coming along for the ride.
Okay. So, among my StumbleUpon interests, I have "Logic" listed. It was one of my favorite class subjects in school, and a topic that I tend to find intensely engaging. So, yeah, fun, clicking the button on the toolbar would occasionally give me a cool logic-related site to occupy my mind with for five to ten minutes. Cool stuff.
Then I discovered the StumbleVideo function. Wasted some time with that for a while in a way largely similar to what I had done with the websites. But then I noticed that you could filter the results based on interest tags. I tried that a couple times, finding some pretty cool linguistics- or philosophy-related videos to watch for a while. Then, I tried Logic.
Dear lord. I am dumbstruck at the things that people will mark as being related to logic. From videos of people playing some kind of keyboard-like instrument to an old lady whacking the hood of a car and causing the airbag to deploy-- well, those were some of the more nonsensical results, which don't really have anything to do with what I'm ranting about, but were weird and unrelated enough that I felt like mentioning them.
*COUGH*. Anyways. There were a few results that made me groan and slap my forehead at the fact that people had marked them as related to logic. Examples: 9/11 conspiracy theorists, clips from a sitcom called "Big Bang Theory" (Basically a show made so that "normal" people could point and laugh at how nerdy the main characters are), political debates/monologues, videos on string theory and other physics-related topics, etc.
Now, all this really does is serve to underscore something I had already realized about people when they talk about "logic"-- namely, that hardly anybody seems to know what the fuck logic actually is. (Now, with science, I'll admit that one can possibly draw a connection. But any connection between logic and string theory is most likely a bit tenuous, at best.)
When people talk about using "logic", I notice, what they actually mean tends to fall into one of a few distinct categories. Optimistically, what people mean when they say "logic" is, very often, "critical thinking". Critical thinking definitely plays a large part in logic, but they are not one and the same. Still, if you are using critical thinking, even in lieu of true logic, it's a badge of honor in your name as far as I'm concerned. You've got the proverbial baby in the bathwater.
Regressing to the next level down on the optimism scale brings us to where we tend to find YouTube commenters a good 95%+ of the time, and general forum-dwellers a not-much-more-optimistic 75%. To wit: "Stuff that makes sense (to me)". People who cite things like "We can't have evolved from monkeys, because then why are there still monkeys?" as being "logic" are a clear example of this. (If anybody reading this thinks this is a logical argument, and would like it explained why I think it isn't, I'd be glad to oblige; however, being the optimistic little chum I am when it comes to the faculties of reason of the friends I hold near and dear, I'm going to assume I needn't waste my breath.)
The next level down, "Sciencey stuff", is last I can really be bothered to think of at the moment. Reserved for those who don't even really expend any thought towards the meaning of "logic" (not even to get it wrong), there really isn't much that can be said about this category.
So when am I going to stop acting like a pompous prick and actually explain what logic means? No time like the present, I say.
Now, the field of philosophy is obviously one in which a lot of ideas get thrown around. At some point, the ancient greeks decided that they needed a system to pick the good ones out from the bad ones. From this was born the simple, yet powerful idea that the conclusion of an argument must unequivocally and necessarily follow from its premises. That is to say, if you accept a certain proposition as true, then you must accept what follows from that proposition. For instance, take the classic example:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
If you accept statements one and two, you are all but forced to accept the conclusion, statement three. Arguments needn't be so obvious as this, but this is just a useful example. An argument is said to be "valid" if its conclusion follows from its premises, and "sound" if its premises can also be demonstrated to be true.
Now, obviously there's more to it than all that, but I'm not going to talk your ear off here; that's a good enough basic understanding. (If I somehow didn't satiate your TL;DR hunger, you can check out the Wikipedia article for some more in-depth info. Fascinating read, but then, I usually find wikipedia to be such, colossal dork that I am.)
As a special bonus with the "good logic" package, as described above, the field of logic also lets you learn to spot bad logic, or what we call logical fallacies. Basically, fallacies are bad arguments that can, with varying levels of success, trick people into thinking that they're good arguments.
Let's take an if/then statement. "If A, then B". (This can also be worded "A implies B"). If we assert that A is true, then by that statement, B must be true too. But what about if we assert that B is true? Does that mean that A is true?
Nnnnope. This is a fallacy called "Affirming the consequent", a formal fallacy that's probably one of the easiest to spot. To put it in perspective, let's replace A and B with actual statements: "If an animal is a cat, then it is furry. My dog is furry. Therefore, my dog is a cat."
Seems pretty hard to fall for when you put it like that. But it can get a bit more muddled when you're dealing with issues less cut-and-dried. To wit: "It has been scientifically proven that watching TV has a negative effect on grades. Grades have dropped steadily over the past five years. Therefore, children are watching too much TV." They can get even trickier than that, but I'm sure you understand by now what to watch out for.
Then, there are informal fallacies. These are FAR more common than formal fallacies, like the one above. For example:
"Bob never lies. I know this because Bob told me so, and since Bob is such an honest person, I've no choice but to believe him."
This is known as "Circular logic", also called "begging the question". Basically, the arguer asks you to accept as a premise (begs) the conclusion that he/she is trying to prove (the question).
A very important thing to understand, though, is that an argument being invalid does NOT mean its conclusion is untrue. Bob may be honest, and children may be watching too much TV. Those conclusions, though, don't follow from their premises in the arguments I've presented, so we can't say they're true based on those arguments.
The two main modes of debunking an argument with logic are identifying fallacy, and identifying contradiction. A contradictory argument, in logic, is one from which you can derive a statement with the format: "A and Not A". Or, basically, "A is true, and A is false".
But I'm getting too rambly here. The point is, THIS is the sort of stuff that logic is.
I think I've proven, by way of sheer TL;DR-ness, how fascinated I am with this subject; so while I won't jump down someone's throat over it, I at least eyetwitch when people bandy about the word "logic" without having any idea of what it actually means.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 02:13 pm (UTC)Matt, I'm so sorry. Maybe I'm epic in slow today, but I reread this entry a million times and it just all went over my head.
Though I find Wikipedia an excellent read, too. X3
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 10:06 am (UTC)Needless to say, I forgot it all as soon as the final was finished.
And considering I have finished all math I will ever need to take in college, I'm not too likely to remember it again unless someone brings it up. So I know what you're talking about, only I never use it.
XDD;;