Thread: Logic

I think this subject is misunderstood & used poorly by many members here, including myself on occassion...so I figured maybe it's worth discussing.

What is logic?
Logic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Logic (from the Greek λογική logikē)[1] is the study of arguments.[2] Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. Logic examines general forms which arguments may take, which forms are valid, and which are fallacies. It is one kind of critical thinking. In philosophy, the study of logic figures in most major areas of focus: epistemology, ethics, metaphysics. In mathematics, it is the study of valid inferences within some formal language.[3]

Logic has origins in several ancient civilizations, including India, China and Greece. Logic was established as a discipline by Aristotle, who gave it a fundamental place in philosophy. The study of logic was part of the classical trivium.

Averroes defined logic as "the tool for distinguishing between the true and the false;"[4] Richard Whately, "the Science, as well as the Art, of reasoning;" and Gottlob Frege, "the science of the most general laws of truth." The article Definitions of logic provides citations for these and other definitions.

Logic is often divided into two parts, inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. The first is drawing general conclusions from specific examples, the second drawing logical conclusions from definitions and axioms. A similar dichotomy, used by Aristotle, is analysis and synthesis. Here the first takes an object of study and examines its component parts. The second considers how parts can be combined to form a whole.
Logic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Majiik & I have gotten into a discussion on the last few pages of another thread http://www.politicsforum.com/politic...enalty-33.html in which this subject came up & I think it's an interesting topic. I took an undergraduate course in Logic in college &, even though we all use it every day, we don't always have a good grasp on it.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Here you go, wandering into my particular area of expertise...

Originally Posted by Inspector Gently

Logic is part of the classical trivium, but if my dusty old memory is correct so is Rhetoric.

I think this website is a forum for rhetoric, not necessarily logic.

Ah...but they are very closely related. There is no rhetoric without logic. Aristotle famously said "Rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic." By 'dialectic,' he meant logical thought, and 'antistrophe' means 'complement,' like a complementary angle. One cannot have and express a logically sound thought without the means of communicating it, and that communication is rhetoric. Some like to think that rhetoric is just the fancy decoration we place on our ideas (Plato called it 'cookery') but Aristotle rightly saw that the idea and the means of communicating that idea are so closely related that the idea doesn't really exist without means.

When we talk about logic in forums like this one, it's almost never the formal notions of rhetoric that we're concerned about. Almost no one fails to recognize the unsoundness of a formal fallacy. We do see lots of INFORMAL fallacies (e.g., ad hominem, complex question, post hoc ergo propter hoc, equivocation) all the time. We do this because it works. The thing about informal fallacies is that unless someone wants to defeat a particular idea, they are usually willing to accept an informal fallacy and will even repeat it to others. Informal fallacies are persuasive, formal fallacies usually aren't.

On the board where I used to be a moderator, members actually started a thread in which they reviewed all the informal fallacies. It gave people a place to point to when they pointed out a fallacy in a post.

The course I took in Logic was a pretty tough/Interesting course & pointed out how Ad agencies use hidden logic all the time.I'm dating myself but the old Marlboro cig ad come to mind when it said:

Real men smoke Marlboro!
(the listener fills in the rest subconsciously).......Hey...I don't smoke Marlboro
Therefore...I am not a real man!


I always like the way they use..... The Error of transferred authority
They'll get Tiger Woods to sell cars...for example (just because Tiger is a golf expert doesn't mean he knows anything about cars

Originally Posted by Devil505

The course I took in Logic was a pretty tough/Interesting course & pointed out how Ad agencies use hidden logic all the time.I'm dating myself but the old Marlboro cig ad come to mind when it said:

Real men smoke Marlboro!
(the listener fills in the rest subconsciously).......Hey...I don't smoke Marlboro
Therefore...I am not a real man!


I always like the way they use..... The Error of transferred authority
They'll get Tiger Woods to sell cars...for example (just because Tiger is a golf expert doesn't mean he knows anything about cars

Honestly, it sounds like that class was as much about rhetoric as about logic. Rhetoric would lead to an interest in why the whole 'real man' concept is an important motivator.