We’ll need an actual context here as well. A set of circumstances in which men and women choose particular behaviors in interacting. Then they have a discussion regarding the consequences of those interactions.
The words “logical” and “reasonable” will come up and the serious philosophers here can note for us what “for all practical purposes” the distinction is.
You pick it.
That’s the impression I got. But I never knew if the people who said it knew for sure.
To me this is just another example of a “general description intellectual contraption” that “serious philosophers” love to exchange. This time about logic.
Is it logical? Is it reasonable? Well, it would seem this depends on whether or not others agree with the definition and the meaning given to one set of words insofar as they establish or sustain the definition and the meaning of another set of words.
On the other hand, what is the use value and the exchange value of these definitions and meanings in regard to making a distinction between arguments of those on, say, either side of any particular set of conflicting goods?
And, no, not just abortion. That just happens to be own favorite.
??? to decide what the word logic means`? Why not back up the definition of logic and reason you quoted from Quora? You presented that to us as, presumably, a rational description of these two things. Tell you what. Show us through a context why that statement you quoted makes any sense.
Always presenting your desires as what we need.
Well, show us how it’s done. The post I quoted was utterly up in the clouds, abstract, intellectual (and I think wrong). I disagreed with that quotes sense of logic. It is quite incorrect.
I don’t suddenly get the onus to now come up with a context.
YOu give a context to made that silly quote by some non.expert at quora and show us how
Logic seeks
How logic wants tangible, visible and audible proof
and all the rest of the idiocy in that quote.
I know, you’re Iamb, you never have to back up anything you say.
I came across a post where he said that he retired in 1995. That suggests he was born in 1930s. So it’s probable.
Okay, the context is abortion. There are three discussions. The first revolves around the best way as a medical procedure to abort the unborn. The second discussion revolves around whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing to take the life of an unborn human being. Also, a third discussion commences regarding when, from the moment of conception on, the unborn becomes a human being.
Now, given your own understanding of both logic and reason, what distinctions would you make in each of the three discussions> Would the meaning of the words be interchangeable in all three discussions?
Me?
Well, I make a distinction here between things able to be demonstrated as reasonable for all of us in the either/or world, and things argued to be reasonable given a certain set of assumptions in the is/ought world.
Logic on the other hand pertains more to the words used insofar as they were in sync with the laws of language.
The language that the doctors exchange in performing the abortion either are in sync with these laws of logic…
[b]What Are the Three Laws of Logic?
by ARC on January 6, 2015 in General Apologetics
By J. P. Moreland –
There are three fundamental laws of logic. Suppose P is any indicative sentence, say, “It is raining.”
The law of identity: P is P.
The law of noncontradiction: P is not non-P.
The law of the excluded middle: Either P or non-P.
The law of identity says that if a statement such as “It is raining” is true, then the statement is true. More generally, it says that the statement P is the same thing as itself and its different from everything else. Applied to all realty, the law of identity says that everything is itself and not something else.
The law of noncontradiction says that a statement such as “It is raining” cannot be both true and false in the same sense. Of course it could be raining in Missouri and not raining in Arizona, but the principle says that it cannot be raining and not raining at the same time in the same place.
The law of the excluded middle says that a statement such as “It is raining” is either true or false. There is no other alternative.[/b]
…or they are not. If Doctor Smith says, “Jane Doe was pregnant and had an abortion”, how would logic be applicable here? Something either is true or it is not. It cannot be both true and not true. It will be one or the other.
But if Jane Doe had an abortion, was said to have behaved immorally and was arrested for murder, the rules of logic would still be applicable given any number of factors that revolve around a discussion of the actual set of circumstances.
But when it comes to philosophers and ethicists discussing the morality of abortion, conflicting assessments of that which constitutes reasonable behavior, will be found all up and down the political spectrum.
Here the question revolves more around the limitations of language and logic in either reconciling or resolving these conflicted goods.
And, insofar as exploring the idea of challenging tabula rasa re logic, who here can really provide us with a detailed, definitive demonstration of how one makes a distinction between nature and nurture, genes and memes, biology and culture.
It’s interesting but you’d be surprised how often following logic leads to fewer propositions than what you start out with. Take syllogisms for example:
All Xs are Ys.
This is an X.
Therefore, it is a Y.
You start with two premises, but you can only derive one conclusion.
Kant is an interesting source for pointing out our a priori axiomatic thinking. And I think it makes sense that we would have at least a few. Would help with survival if we were born hardwired to believe at least a few essential axioms.
You really think that’s what happened to him?
The major premise is a general statement.
What’s the ratio of the total number of general statements imaginable to the total number of specific statements one can imagine?
Pretty low, right?
The minor premise you speak of is a specific statement which, in practice, most commonly represents a belief based on observation or a belief derived from the combination of axiomatic beliefs and beliefs grounded in observations.
Yeah.
I would imagine so. You take a general statement like “All Xs are Ys,” and if there are 1000 Xs, then you can make 1000 specific statements. So yes, I would agree the ratio is usually low.
So what is the point you’re making? That if we start with strictly axiomatic statements, we can draw more conclusions than the number of premises we start out with?
Just a general note: most people fail to understand that logic is a convergence tool, not a divergence tool. It is a tool for taking a number of propositions (premises) and converging them into one (or fewer) propositions (conclusions). Logic is a tool for answering the question: what do all these things mean when taken together? Logical conclusions are typically one sentence summaries of the premises, however many, that you start with.
Do you base this just on his age or do you have other reasons?
Looking at his profile, it says his last visit here was Jan 6th, 2018 (HA! I was still doing drugs at the time). That’s more than a year ago. His last post was on Jan 5th: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=181309&p=2689982#p2689982
I agree with KT, he was a smart dude, but a little off the deep end IMO. I think he was a genius mathematician, which explains his affinity to rationalism, and he tried to carry that over to science and philosophy. He also talked about his artistic skills (which he never flaunted here) so he was a man of many talents. I think if it wasn’t for his ego, his genius would have flourished in everything he put his math smarts into. But he did have an ego complex, and not a healthy one. It was the kind of ego that bruised unbearably at the slightest friction. One minor disagreement, or hint of skepticism over the things he’d say, and he’d rip into you with the harshest criticism of your character. And I’m a bit of a provocateur when it comes to discussions and debates, so you can guess how that never went down well in my encounters with James.
KT’s remark about the rationalist types who think they can figure out the whole universe just by thinking reminded me of James because that’s exactly what he was–in fact, his entire philosophical campaign was explicitly to make that point (he wasn’t the type to deny it but to own up to it with pride). RM:AO (Rational Metaphysics : Affectance Ontology) was just that. RM was the method (rationalism) and AO was the product (a universe of pure affectance). He genuinely believed he had figured out all of physics just by defining affectance in a self-evidence, axiomatic, or tautological way (a way that couldn’t be disputed in any case) and drawing logical inferences and conclusions from that, the first of which is that existence, if anything, must be affectance. Starting with that, he gains entrance into ontology, warranting the assertion that affectance is not just an idea but a reality, and therefore all subsequent implications from that are about reality. He was careful not to disagree with the data reported from actual scientific experiments (on the other hand, he was exceptionally apt to reject any data that didn’t agree with his worldview, bordering on paranoid delusions revolving around conspiracies and lies), but he wildly fought against the mainstream in terms of the standard interpretations most scientists bring to bear on the data, arguing relentlessly that AO was the better, more rational (and absolutely necessary at the end of the day), interpretation.
Naturally, such an approach to science and philosophy will typically run you up against a lot of opposition, and I think this caused him to grow bitter over the years (I imagine an ambitious young James having high hopes of gaining notoriety for his contributions to science and philosophy but after years of constant rejection, and having to resort to posting his thoughts at such an awful venue like ILP (shudder), he learned to be a bit of a misanthrope). But he did leave behind (if he is indeed dead) a huge legacy if only in the form of his numerous posts here and his (Matrix-like) videos and simulations of RM:AO (this would be my advice to young aspiring intellectuals who want to make their mark on the world: it isn’t always about notoriety, but leaving behind your thoughts–as long as you record your thoughts in some persistent manner, you leave something for posterity, and that is a contribution, even if you never become famous for it). As bitter as James was in the end, I don’t think he was a bad guy. I think he kept a good heart at his core, and much of his writing attests to the hope he had, however faint, that man’s state could improve, and that moral right is a virtue.
And if you are alive, James, there’s a glimpse at your future eulogy. Criticisms welome.
Precisely.
As you said, if we start with “All Xs are Ys” then we can easily deduce any number of “This X is Y” statements from it.
But this does not mean that within a single person the ratio of the number of axiomatic beliefs to the number of deduced beliefs cannot be anything but low. It is, of course, quite possible for one’s beliefs to be mostly axiomatic / hypothetical.
What’s of interest to me is the extent to which this trait varies within present day human population.
How many people are almost completely deductive (as in 95% deduced beliefs and 5% axiomatic beliefs), how many are almost completely axiomatic (as in 95% axiomatic beliefs and 5% deduced beliefs) and how many people fall somewhere in between?
My impression is that most people are predominantly deductive (>50% deduced beliefs), a lot of those have their logical ability compromised (with some of them mistakenly believing most of their beliefs are axiomatic) and very few, if any at all, are largely axiomatic.
Yes, logic is a convergence tool but I don’t have the impression that most people fail to understand that.
Fixed Cross wrote,
“This is why I use the guerrilla logic of valuing-based arguments and you end up with a kind of geometry, mapping the terrains and substances in terms of the self-conscious premise.”
That is a question which begs the prioritization of the beginning entrance with the final exit. The ground of self consciouness may be certainly be synthetic, and yet it may very well have an a-priori synthetic value.
That this difficulty in an axiomatic terrain, can not be determined either way, Darwin respective or irrespective, certainly exposes the problem with self conscious and conscious states of determinants.
When does an ape become conscious of how his actions affect his family, of traits descriptive of patterned behaviors as they somehow become indigenous at a certain general stage of development? Or, as traits go, demonstrated by the alpha of the pack leading the way, even pertaining to the earliest sign of developing logical systems ?
The negation implicit in a denial of aggressive behavior sets the stage of modular inception of conditioning effects of restraint, for instance, when the sizing up of relative strengths set the rules to ascertain whether to aggressively attack or withdraw from a foe.
The modality becomes a descriptive and representative mode to build or deconstruct the reality in context - of attacking , or withdrawing.
How do you derive “This X is Y” just from “All Xs are Ys”? Don’t you need the minor premise “This is an X”? Yes, it’s an empirical statement, or maybe derived from other axiomatic terms, but where are those other axiomatic terms?
When you talk about axiomatic beliefs and deduced beliefs, are you speaking strictly in the formal sense of the terms? Because I think very few people use formal logical deduction. People are a lot more sloppy in their thinking than computers (or how we imagine computers calculating logic) so I wouldn’t necessarily regard the manner by which they draw their conclusions as “deduction”. As for axioms, what is an axiom to you? To me it just means a foundational assumption for a system of thought (typically irreducible, otherwise why not reduce it further and get even more fundamental axioms). When you brought up the point about the minor premise in the syllogism being derived from empirical experience or other axioms, that seemed to imply you think axioms are underived–that is, self-evidently or tautologically true (i.e. their truth is manifest in their content). If this is what you mean by axiom, again I think there are very few people who think axiomatically (though there might be plenty who think their core assumptions are true simply because they’re self-evident, but again I think this is just due to sloppy thinking).
You mean beliefs derived from other beliefs? I have no idea what the ratio is between these kinds of beliefs and other kinds, but we forget the sources of the bulk of our beliefs and therefore say things like “I don’t know, that’s just what I believe,” making it seem axiomatic. Again, this all depends on what you mean by “deduction” and “axiom”.
I do. When I talk to people about this, I get the impression they think of logic as something that can take you in many different directions from a single proposition. Not sure why. I think it’s because when you speak about logic as a method of getting from premises to conclusions, it conjures the image of a path (getting from point A to point B). You start on a path from a single starting point, and along the way there is the possibility of forks in the road, many possible directions from which to choose, and so I think many people assume a single proposition can lead to many conclusions (not saying this can’t happen but it’s not by virtue of the nature of logic alone). The picture of starting from the beginning of several paths and arriving at a point where they all converge is not as readily conjured by this understanding of logic.
But come to think of it, there are actually a few rules of logic which allow you to draw potentially infinite conclusions from even a single premise. For example, if you start with a proposition P, then you can conclude P or Q (for any Q). For that matter, you can conclude P or Q or R or S or T … Another obvious example is that starting with premise P, you can conclude P and not-not-P. But these are trivial cases that apply to any set of premises. Not very interesting or useful. The point is to derive something interesting or useful, and in regards to that, logic is more likely to reduce the number of propositions than to increase them.
You do need the minor premise, of course, but the minor premise itself need not be axiomatic. It can be, for example, derived from other premises or it can be grounded in one’s observations.
Here’s an example:
Major premise: All men are black.
Minor premise #1: John is a man.
Minor premise #2: Patrick is a man.
Minor premise #3: Sebastian is a man.
etc.
Conclusion #1: John is black.
Conclusion #2: Patrick is black.
Conclusion #3: Sebastian is black.
etc.
Not sure what you mean by “formal logical deduction” but I’d say that if people are sloppy thinkers, that does not necessarily mean they are not doing deduction, it can, for example, mean they are doing it in a sloppy way (which is not a good thing.)
Note that one’s thinking process need not be conscious in order to be categorized as a type of logical deduction. At least not by me.
I’ve introduced three types of beliefs in this thread:
Axioms: these are what I assume you mean when you speak of “pre-logical beliefs” which is beliefs that are literally made up, not grounded in anything. This may not be how the word “axiom” is used officially but that’s not really important. I needed to pick the closest term I can in order to express my thoughts and “axiom” looked like a good fit. Axioms look fishy because they are literally blind (or random) guesses but consider that they may have proven themselves through natural selection (literally, by surviving the long natural process of weeding out organisms with unsuitable random guesses) and that at least some of them can be in theory falsified. It’s possible that axioms have become fixed, or at least near-completely unchangeable, in humans. “The principle of the uniformity of nature” that underlies inductive reasoning and probabilistic reasoning is an example of an axiom. (EDIT: Made a quick correction: axioms can be tested.)
Empirical or observation-based beliefs: these are beliefs grounded in observation e.g. “I saw him wearing a white coat”. These are reliable to the extent that one’s memory is reliable. Like axioms, they can’t be tested.
Logic-based or deduced beliefs: these are beliefs derived from existing beliefs using logical deduction. These can be tested.
Right, so the major premise needs the help of additional premises–observations, assumptions, axioms, whatever–but you can’t do anything with it alone (short of concluding “All men are black” as per Aristotle’s law of identity).
In formal logic, deduction refs to a pattern of reasoning whereby one starts with a set of premises and arrives at a set of conclusions with strict unwaivering logic–that is, without room for error or doubt. If the premises are true, the conclusions must be true. It’s not enough to just start with premises and stumble your way to a conclusion, the method has to be absolutely rigorous. It’s more than just a continuity of thought between premises and conclusions, it’s a continuity that thoroughly meets the criteria of logic.
Deduction is typically contrasted with induction, which is the method by which we draw conclusions from premises that requires a bit of a leap (or a generalization). For example, every morning I wake up, the sun rises. Therefore, the sun always rises in the morning. This is reasonable, but strictly speaking not logical. Logically speaking, it is possible that the sun won’t rise tomorrow (it might explode or something). Induction is essentially the tendency of thought to jump to conclusions when it feels like it has enough evidence or reasoning, but not necessarily all the evidence or reasoning it could possibly have.
Technically, this means if someone is doing deductive thinking in a sloppy way, they aren’t doing deduction at all.
I could believe that, but when we bring up the unconscious, we’re at the mercy of speculation. What seems like gaps in the logic of one’s thinking might really be unconscious steps in the thinking… but maybe not. Sometimes the unconscious forces that drive our thinking aren’t hidden logical steps, but motives other than being logical or seeking truth (for example, a clergyman arguing for the existence of God isn’t necessarily motivated by showing others the truth, but helping his religion to gain power). When it comes to the unconscious, anything can be proposed. Also, keep in mind that speculation on the unconscious content or motives of another’s mind might just as easily be unconscious content or motives of your own mind being projected onto the other.
A couple points:
I’m not a logician, but what I gather is that an axiom is not just a baseless or underived assumption, but an assumption that can’t be doubted (or is very difficult to doubt). In Euclid’s geometry, two parallel lines will never meet. How could it be otherwise? ← That’s an example of an axiom. They are ungrounded because they don’t need to be. They are self-evidently self-sufficient. Compare that with the belief in God. Such a belief is questioned all the time and there is no reason to suppose it couldn’t be another way. (There is Einsteinian geometry which will tell you that two parallel lines can meet–just picture them on the surface of a sphere–but I question whether these really count as “lines”.)
We’re on the same page when it comes to certain axioms being locked into the human brain as a result of natural selection, but then are they really “made up”? In a sense they are–the brain is “making them up”–but from our inner subjective point of view, we’re not making them up, we’re simply cognizant of them. We experience them as truths which we somehow know (like uniformity of nature, or the principle of sufficient reason). This experience can be contrasted with that of being creative with our imaginations, which we very consciously know we’re making up. Furthermore, there’s also a difference between axioms that seem self-evident only because our brains won’t let us think otherwise (or at least makes it very difficult), and axioms that are self-evident because they really are necessary. Uniformity in nature and the principle of sufficient reason are good examples of the former, and David Hume demonstrated this 300 years ago by sharply contrasting what we have a right to say based on strict logic and what we have a habit of saying simply because it seems intuitive to us. Euclid’s geometry, on the other hand, is, as far as I’m concerned, a good example of the latter (probably because geometry is purely an abstract conceptual construct).
What do you mean, they can’t be tested? I would think if anything can be tested, it’s empirical claims. But I suppose you mean that the test you would use to verify it is already the basis upon which you derived the belief, and there is no further test to verify the belief.
And should.
That’s deduction, yes.
And an interesting obsevation is that every inductive argument has an equivalent deductive argument. All one has to do is to discover the hidden assumptions and make them explicit.
The question is what they are trying to do, not whether the result can be called deduction.
“Made up” as in not derived from observations or previous beliefs. You can also say “imagined”. “Made up” as in freely invented by human mind.
Again, what I mean by the word is not necessarily what is meant by the world in general. Indeed, “Two parallel lines will never meet” is most definitely not an axiom in the way that I’m using the word here. That would be a classic belief deduced from definitions.
The axioms I speak of need not be self-evident and/or hard to doubt.
You can test a hypothesis (by making observations) but you cannot test an observation.
You can test it for a marginal variety of properties.
In Aristotles time it was considered self-evident that a single premise can not contain logical substance. There must always be several premises to generate some form of thought process, such as an argument.
I agree with your general approach, gib -
my personal addition is that logic forces our observed world into distinct premises so as to be able to process this world.
So a highly logical mind would be most unnatural, in that it always forcefully extracts quasi isolated premises from the flux of the world which is what I refer to as nature.
As you see Ive now extracted two concepts from nature; logic and nature. Ive created a distinction so as to be able to share a viewpoint.
I don’t think James died by the way. I think he’s been here with at least 2 peusdonyms after he left as James. Ill do him the courtesy of not revealing them but their style was rather unmistakable, especially of one name. It was like James figuring out how to be meaningfully incognito, hearkening back to his days as a serviceman.
I wonder, given our inability to even reach a consensus over what logic is, if logic is not a thing every logician has to figure out a way into from his personal set of premises deliberately.
Like it could be that its not given, that its “essence” is somehow hidden from explicity because… well maybe because it isnt logical for it to be able to fully explicated;
what if logic leads to increasingly alternate world-views because it is not really a method of correspondence, but of something else?
I mean again to curve a bend toward the value concept, which is curled by proximity to the unfathomable necessities that really drive things.
Previously, psychonauts recognized this kind of weirdness wired into the world as “different dimensions”. That’s not entirely nonsensical; value could be said to include all recognized dimensions and propagate in such powerful ways that it may be that it has several dimensions rolled up in it.
I suggest that you break the ice by explaining what you mean when you use the word (:
The word “logic” has multiple meanings but I’d say that in many cases it refers to deductive reasoning. I am sure that most people know what deduction is.
Well…
Logic is drawing consequences.
Deduction is a safe and sure way, but not productive of much. Science is inductive, requires observations and context-pool constructions.
Induction selectively integrates contingencies. Deduction eliminates them.
Inductive logic is creative of new knowledge by creating “slots” for new information to fall into and become significant, deductive logic can only arrive at the meaning of its premises.
Aristotle is the paragon of deductive logic.
Archimedes is the originator of inductive logic. His lineage includes Galileo-Newton-Einstein, pure inductive logicians. The most radically inductive logician of fame who often crosses the bounds into the nonlogical is Freud.
As Francis Bacon first observed, logic of deduction isnt really worth much as far as creating consequences is concerned.
So deductive logic only discerns consequences which are already implicit in held knowledge, inductive logic produces consequences which were not yet given and does so by discovering correspondences between different paradigms of meaning.
When you produce an algorithm capable of induction you have an actual intelligence. Computer hardware is deductive machinery.
Deduction is heavy on postulations and aims for truth, inductive logic is heavy on hypotheses and aims for knowledge. Deduction is metaphysical, induction is physical.
The existence of induction and its possibility form an initially non-conceptual hypothesis, called “genius” or “intuition” or “creative intelligence” or “god” until Philosophy has arrived at the formulation of this hypothesis through the German idealists in the concept of “will”.
Metaphors
Deduction is will-less, it is like water, flows down and produces downward pressure and stays equal to itself. Induction is active, like wood, it assimilates elements into upward pressure and grows with respect to itself. To extend the metaphor: the tree draws water upward, and does this by using an inner law of water, which is cohesion.
Truth corresponds, Nature coheres. Spinoza’s God is meant to synthesize induction and deduction completely, aiming for a synthetic absolute. This however defeats the purpose of induction, as no new hypothesis are possible inside this system. The Germans then took the phenomenon of synthesis (nature) as a universal and took down the standing absolute, proving deduction and synthesis to be in part at odds. Hence, subjectivism, and the universe of value ontology (;