From: matus [matus@snet.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 9:16 PM
To: matus@snet.net
Subject: MFD List - In defense of logic

(All, the following is a good article that is an introduction to logic.
Namely, the idea that particular arguments are valid or not valid for
particular reasons.  The basic premise is that the two people disagree on
something, first define what the disagreement is about then proceed to use
logical arguments to draw a valid conclusion.  If you argument is based on
any invalid premise or invalid conclusion, then it is logically not valid,
i.e. its irrational.  When Aristotle first formulated the basis for modern
logic, he believed he had solved all of humanities ill's, since if two
people follow such steps they will easily resolve just about any conflict
that occurs.  Unfortunately it never saw, and has since never, seen
widespread use in the populace, people prefer to base arguments purely on
emotion, which can almost never be objectively resolved.  After learning
what makes a logical argument and what makes a statement valid or invalid, I
have found resolving disagreements far easier and accomplished with little
or no personal offense taken or received.  The value of logic in our
everyday lives is immeasurable.  Such applications of logic can help to
resolve anything from political decisions, scientific decisions, or quarrels
between families or loved one.  I wonder what the world would be like if a
significant portion of the population understood and followed the basic
rules of logic.  The following article is a brief history and introduction
to modern logical reasoning, I highly recommend it. - Mike)

In defense of logic
----------
Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Steven Yates
   "Carried out properly, a course in logic can greatly improve
   a college student's ability to think independently, as
   an individual and not simply a herd member, and not be taken to
   the cleaners by every fashion to come along." (04/17/02)
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=935&FS=In+Defense+of+Logic

In Defense of Logic

by Steven Yates

[Posted April 17, 2002]

In the opening remarks of Ludwig von Mises's first formal seminar in
America, the revered teacher held up a copy of a book and announced:  "to
understand economics, this is the book you should read first."  According to
Mises's student and friend George Koether, the book he was holding was An
Introduction to Logic and Scientific Thought by Morris Cohen and Ernest
Nagel, first published in 1934 and now out of print.

Even in 1944, Mises must have sensed that formal instruction in logic,
particularly as it relates to the social sciences, was in decline. Today, it
has almost completely collapsed. This is not to say that one cannot find
courses in logic on college and university campuses. But these courses are
little more than decorations. Students take them to avoid having to take
mathematics. They are given symbols and sets of rules for how to "work
proofs."  There is no implication of larger issues involved. Brighter
students inevitably come away with the sense of having just wasted time on a
game.

Meanwhile, the polylogism Mises refuted in Human Action is everywhere. While
60 years ago it took the form of classical Marxism, today we have
multiculturalism, radical feminism, and even "queer theory" with their
suggestions that each group has its own "logic."  The idea of a single logic
is presented as nothing more than a Western white-male prejudice-a
Eurocentric point of view.

As a philosopher who taught classical Aristotelian logic for more than five
years at three different universities, I sometimes wonder whether there is
even room for the subject on campus today. A professor of philosophy who
sees logic as doing more for students than giving them a semester of
busywork could easily find his employment in jeopardy. This article begins
this philosopher's campaign to rectify this unfortunate situation. We need
to defend logic!

First, what is logic? As a discipline, logic goes back to the ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was not inventing a game. He saw logic as
central to proper human thought, because reality itself conformed to logical
principles (this is how we would put it today). The ability to reason was
what separated us from the animals. Western civilization got its start with
the application of logical thought to the world around us, ranging from
scientific explanation to the development of commerce.

Western civilization is also fundamentally Christian. When the great
medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas merged Aristotelian thought with
Christian theology, the long-term result was modern science. Science
developed in the West and nowhere else, because nowhere else did human
beings have the idea that the fundamental workings of the world were
comprehensible. We had this idea because we believed it was created by a
rational God who also created us with rational minds. Our minds were capable
of comprehending the world's order, at least in part, through-what else?-the
judicious application of logic.

A good formal definition of logic is:  the discipline concerned with the
study and evaluation of reasoning. One may consult any number of textbooks
on the subject. They all present some variant of this basic definition,
which also implies evaluation of one's use of language. Reasoning is usually
expressed as arguments and inferences.

Note this use of argument first. As the logician uses the term, it does not
mean a disagreement (much less what happens on campuses today when radical
activists encounter an idea they disagree with). It refers to a set of
statements. At least one of these statements is called the argument's
premise(s). A premise is an argument's starting point. The premises of an
argument are offered as evidence in support of its conclusion-the statement
the argument is intended to establish. Good, sound reasoning occurs when a
person infers a conclusion from true, meaningful premises, and when we
evaluate the inference or act of reasoning we see that it hangs together
properly.

There are a number of implications here-all of them at odds with the major
tendencies of the day.

First is the idea that words (such as those forming the technical vocabulary
of logic) indeed do have reasonably precise meanings and that there are
definite cognitive rights and wrongs. Some statements are true; others are
false, period.

Second is the implication that arguments and evidence matter-it is not
sufficient simply to assert what one wants to be true or feels is true.
While we may disagree over cases, or over whether evidence really supports a
conclusion, logic is not about feelings; it is about evaluating instances of
reasoning and uses of language.

Third is the focus on the evaluative component. Logic doesn't concern itself
with how people actually do think, even when they know not to rely on
feelings. It lays out rules to determine whether or not their thinking is
correct. Not just any premises will support any conclusion.

One of the most important components of a course in logic involves
identifying the rules determining whether an argument or inference is
valid-that is, whether its premise(s) indeed establishes its conclusion.
These rules are given names used as justification for judging someone's
argument.

In teaching logic, after setting out a number of basic definitions (argument
itself, premise, conclusion, deduction, inference, valid, and so on) and
explaining what they refer to, one ought to turn to Aristotle's principle of
noncontradiction, which stands at the foundation of Aristotelian classical
logic. Aristotle had a typically Aristotelian way of expressing it:

[T]he same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the
same subject and in the same respect; ...  For it is impossible for any one
to believe the same thing to be and not to be,... and if it is impossible
that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject
... and if an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, obviously
it impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to
be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have
contrary opinions at the same time.... (Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 3,
Richard McKeon edition.)

In plain English: All contradictory statements and beliefs are false. This
is common horse sense, is it not?  There can't both be and not be houses on
Elm Street. Either there are or there aren't. Why belabor this?  Because
many "postmodernist" academic thinkers (I use this last term loosely) write
as if they believe otherwise. They say that the above statement is a product
of Western "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism."

What do such claims really mean. That in some multiculturalist or
de-Westernized environment devoid of "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism," there
can both be and not be houses on Elm Street?  It isn't clear to me what
would happen if a student, imbibed on too much Aristotle, were to ask a
multiculturalist philosophy professor such a question. One suspects the
student wouldn't ask, if he valued his grade.

A device I frequently used in teaching logic I called the semantic triangle
(semantics being a branch of philosophical logic concerned with the
relationship between language and the world). This device made its practical
import clear. More a device for classification and organization than
evaluation of arguments, the semantic triangle distinguishes between terms
and sentences (linguistic entities generally), ideas or categories or
propositions or theories (conceptual entities generally) and objects and
classes of objects by type (material entities or classes of such entities
generally).

Words and sentences are not the same things as concepts; concepts are not
the same things as objects. Words refer to objects, but are not themselves
objects. Moreover, sentences and propositions are not the same thing:  it is
raining and il pleut are quite different sentences but express the same
proposition. A theory (a set of propositions) is not simply a set of
sentences on paper-if I write out a set of sentences expressing Newton's
theory of universal gravitation and then burn it, I have not thereby burned
up and destroyed Newton's theory.

And there is a difference between a theory and what a theory is about (some
subject matter in the world). Neither ideas nor the world somehow reduce to
language, no matter what the followers of Derrida say. By charting and
studying the relationships this device sets up, students are able to come to
grips with how words and ideas are organized and how they relate to the
world, including subject matters of other courses ranging from foreign
languages to science and technology. The difference between good,
informative genus-and-difference definitions (my initial definition of logic
exemplifies this method of defining) and merely pointing and saying, "That's
what one of those things looks like," falls into place.

Students who had been enrolled in one of my logic classes sometimes came to
me a semester later and told me how useful the course had been, however
esoteric it seemed at the time. (It might be useful to note that some of
these students were majoring in subjects like chemical engineering. They
were quite bright and very articulate. Had the course not been useful to
them, one can rest assured I would have heard about it!)

Another useful topic for a logic course is basic statistical literacy.
Statistical arguments form one species of arguments that establish their
conclusions not absolutely but only to some degree of probability-inductive
arguments, we logic-teacher types call them. We contrast these with
deductive arguments that establish their conclusions absolutely if their
premises are true. Other inductive-argument forms include enumerations,
analogies, inferences to the next case, and many scientific generalizations.

A nice little book I used once or twice was Darrell Huff's absorbing How To
Lie With Statistics. It enumerated the things that can go wrong in a
statistical argument. Your sample size can be too small. Can we generalize,
for example, from a statement about a few people living in my apartment
complex in Auburn, Alabama, to a conclusion about the population of
small-town America as a whole?  Or one's sample can be selective:  would we
really want to rely on a statistical generalization about political beliefs
in America generally based on a sample of university professors?  I
certainly hope not!

One can use misleading charts or graphs, or draw a relationship between two
sets of events and argue that because the one precedes the other it causes
the other (a mistake sometimes known as post hoc ergo promter hoc-or, after
this therefore because of this). For example, even if some climatologists
claim that summers are getting hotter, it would not follow without a lot of
additional evidence that human activity is responsible-the "global warming"
argument in a nutshell.

This example commits one of our earlier blunders as well-by simply ignoring
scientists who question the premise that the earth is really heating up.
Reliable temperature records only go back so far, and tree rings may tell a
quite different story. One of the dirty little secrets of statistics is that
it is often very hard to get a good sample that is both large enough and
sufficiently free of biases of one sort or another.

Finally, a topic very much worth canvassing in a standard, university-level
logic course is the fallacy-a generic term for any mistake in reasoning or
disputation. We just considered some statistical fallacies, but there are
many other ways an argument can go wrong. We give informal fallacies names
to make them easier to spot.  Some are quite common. An ad hominem does not
evaluate a person's argument but attacks the person who made it. Think of
every time someone responds to a criticism of affirmative action with, "You
must be a closet racist bigot," or the equivalent. Name-calling is a typical
ad hominem tactic.

Ad hominem has several more subtle varieties. "Isn't he associated with the
Mises Institute?"  Used as a rejoinder to some substantive argument, it
doesn't engage what was concluded, or how well argued. In one way or
another, it attacks the speaker-sometimes by attacking his associations (a
ploy called guilt by association) or describing his circumstances so as to
insinuate that he cannot be objective ("the Mises Institute is currently
paying your salary; naturally you're going to say that").

Other common informal fallacies include circular reasoning or begging the
question, in which the argument's conclusion is smuggled into the premises.
Christians, for example, should not rely exclusively on the Bible to argue
for the divine inspiration of the Bible, not if they can draw on history,
archeology, transformed lives, or other sources of evidence.

A red herring diverts attention from the main issue onto a side issue.
Defenders of Bill Clinton committed a red herring when they accused
Republicans of being obsessed with sex when the real issues were Clinton's
having lied under oath to a grand jury and having obstructed justice.

Misuse of authority appeals to an authority in order to stop a discussion,
to the wrong sort of authority to establish a conclusion possibly in the
absence of evidence, or to a supposed authority who is obviously biased. Of
course, many arguments making use of authority in one way or another are
entirely rational if the authority is knowledgeable and one has no reason to
question his or their motives. An argument from authority operates on the
assumption that the authority has the evidence relevant to establishing the
argument's conclusion. No one has the time or inclination to become an
expert on everything, and in our cognitive division of labor, we often have
to rely on the expertise of others. Recognizing that some appeals to
authority are not fallacious acknowledges this.

More fallacies: an argument from ignorance treats lack of proof of a
negative as if it were positive evidence ("Space aliens might be real,
because no one has ever proved they aren't"). A caution is in order,
however: In an argument, the burden of evidence is on the claimant. If the
claimant fails to produce the evidence that would establish his conclusion
after repeated and perhaps exhaustive attempts, this may be the basis for an
inductive argument that the conclusion is untrue and that attempts to
establish it ought to be abandoned.

An appeal to pity or emotion plays on feelings and uses them as evidence
("Gee, officer, if I have to pay this ticket I won't be able to take my
child to the doctor tomorrow," or "our ancestors were slaves; look how
behind we are economically. Poor us-we are entitled to reparations"). Again:
emotions are not evidence. Threats, efforts to intimidate, etc., are related
to appeals to pity in that they attempt to compel belief without evidence.

A strawman attacks, not an actual argument that anyone makes or stance that
anyone holds, but a grotesquely oversimplified version of it. Consider the
person who asks libertarians, "Aren't you guys really just Republicans who
want to smoke dope legally?" Strawmen may result from mere failures to do
one's homework when evaluating someone else's stance, or they may be
products of deliberate efforts to mislead and misdirect.

An equivocation uses a term in such a way that it could have more than one
meaning. Words like nondiscrimination are particularly vulnerable to
equivocal usagesin any given usage; does it mean race-blindness or in
practice is discrimination against white males (especially non-leftist white
males) encompassed by its meaning? What may open the door to equivocation,
particularly in debates over policy, is the failure to give a term a precise
meaning in the first place; this was the case with affirmative action.

Finally, there is the horselaugh-named for H.L. Mencken, who (unfortunately)
once asserted that "One good horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms."
("Darwinian evolution possibly false?  Oh, c'mon, you can't be serious!
Hahahahahaha!")

This is just a generous sampling; there are many more. Entire books have
been written about fallacies. One wonders how many of them are opened today,
or if they are just gathering dust on college and university library
shelves.

Once we take all this seriously, we have to throw out a lot of what passes
for scholarship today-and very possibly, a lot of teaching as well, to the
extent that it has come to express the teacher's feelings or attempt to
elicit feelings from students instead of to address facts of reality.
Moreover, if a student begins a sentence with, "Well, I just feel that . . .
" a professor who is thinking logically has no choice but to respond, "This
course is not about your feelings." Where logic is taken seriously, correct
thinking is what counts-not feelings. On this point, Ayn Rand and her
followers got it right: Emotions are not tools of cognition.

Now consider one of the dominant doctrines on campus today:
multiculturalism. How does it hold up, logically? One of the basic ideas
behind multiculturalism is that every culture, racial grouping, etc., has
its own experience and defines its own truth or reality. One question a
logical mind may want to raise is: In this case, what is the status of the
multiculturalist thesis itself?

Do we get different "multicultural truths" for black multiculturalists,
Hispanic multiculturalists, Asian multiculturalists, queer-studies
multiculturalists, and so on? Is "academic culture" itself a valid culture
of sorts? If so, the culture of academic multiculturalists can define
"multicultural truth."  But in that case, what they define wouldn't
necessarily hold for those of us subsisting in "nonacademic culture" (also
known as the real world).

Perhaps the multiculturalist thesis is that "all cultures are equal, or
morally equivalent." In this case, the culture of non-multiculturalists is
morally equal to that of multiculturalists, and there is no reason to prefer
the latter to the former. In any case, multiculturalism is destroyed by its
own internal logic. Of course, maybe this doesn't reflect the actual
consequences of multiculturalism. Most multiculturalists are such unclear
reasoners that it is difficult to tell what their statements imply or don't
imply.

Again, many see logic-and therefore critiques of this sort-as Western bias.
Or to put the matter another way, refusing to allow contradictory claims and
arguments into our worldview is a sign of Western bias. In that case, they
are open to the charge of having implied that cultures both do and do not
define their own truth, are both equal and unequal, and maybe that there
both are and are no houses on Elm Street. All of which really helps make
sense of multiculturalism.

Of course, some will wonder:  why these logical contortions? Why not just
ask:  where, anywhere in the world, has a multicultural society actually
worked? Shouldn't the burden of argument be on the multiculturalist? Agreed.
It should be, and in academies where rationality was the norm and not the
exception, it would be.

The point is, we can show that given any clear formulation, the idea
unravels. Educated people should understand that multiculturalism is just
the current species of intellectual relativism-what Mises called
polylogism-and that whatever predicaments polylogism is in will be
transferred to multiculturalism. A rational mind shouldn't be tempted by it
in any guise.

Any stance that relativizes truth to some framework dividing the human race
into collectives (a theory, worldview, paradigm, culture, race, gender,
sexual preference or preference for decaf) invalidates itself from within by
robbing the stance of any cognitive claim on anyone outside the framework's
adherents. If "feminist epistemologists" claim that men and women experience
the world in different ways by virtue of women's being an oppressed group,
they cannot simultaneously claim that a "female-friendly science," whatever
it would be, would be superior to or have any claim on the allegiance of
men. Polylogism is always self-defeating. Socrates wielded an argument of
this kind against the relativism of the sophist Protagoras with great skill,
in one of the most important of Plato's dialogues, the Thaeatetus.

A few decades ago, serious scholars understood logic. Relativism existed,
but aside from  a few classical Marxists, it was an off-campus coffeehouse
curiosity and not a serious academic stance. Today, you can present such
arguments to tenured professors and receive blank stares of
noncomprehension.

The above, of course, is only a sketch of a broad and once-respected
subject. We've only scratched the surface regarding its applicability to the
current crisis in higher education. But hopefully we've gotten the point
across:  the study of logic requires clarity, an exactness of definition,
and a precision of thought. It implies better versus worse in human
reasoning, and that what counts in reasoning is evidence, not emotion.
Carried out properly, a course in logic can greatly improve a college
student's ability to think independently, as an individual and not simply a
herd-member, and not be taken to the cleaners by every fashion to come
along.

It can be used to show, moreover, that many beliefs currently held dear on
campuses simply don't make any sense when held up to the light of close,
logical scrutiny. It is thus a highly politically incorrect subject.

Mises was right:  Logic belongs in the core of any good college or
university curriculum. But it does not fit into an arena where emotions
reign, where intimidation is the preferred method of enforcing conformity,
or where "truth" and "right" are determined by the collective will of
agitators-in-training-which is why their pronouncements offer such a gold
mine of examples of horrid reasoning.

What was true in Mises's time remains true in ours:  If you really want to
understand economics, or any social science, or really anything at all, you
must first nail down how to tell what is true from what is false, and how to
distinguish good arguments from bogus ones. This means studying and
mastering the discipline of logic, and knowing how to  apply it.

______________________

Steven Yates (Yates@mises.org) is a Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, where he is working on a book. He is the author of Civil Wrongs:
What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and dozens of
articles in both academic and nonacademic periodicals. A version of this
article ran on www.Lewrockwell.com See also An Introduction to Economic
Reasoning by David Gordon.

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