In Conclusion

Overall, I'm incredibly thankful that I decided to take Logic this semester. Yes, I needed it for my minor, but that's not the point. This class has really made me think about the way I frame my arguments. Even in everyday language, I'm pretty sure my conclusions don't always follow exactly from my premises. None-the-less, the course has challenged me to think this way.

Also, I really love the strength that comes from deductive logic. The ability to make an argument airtight that can't be proven wrong, based on the premises, is great. I only have one concern moving forward, and this is the question that I will ask you all.


Is formal deductive logic going to change the world? Probably not, right? Well, I'm wondering how we can use logic in the most effective way to posit beneficial change for the world.


Ideas?

Logic and Roadtrips

So, I know this post is a little simple and silly, but I just thought I'd share it with you all. This past weekend I travelled to Toronto with a former philosophy student and current Freel Library employee, Shelby. On the way up, while stuck in traffic, we started cracking logic jokes based on some things we observed. We found the following funny, maybe you will too.

Apparently most highway traveling is a continuous string of disjunctive syllogisms. For example--

Either Route 403 or Route 410 is the correct route

We know it isn't Route 403

Therefore--it is Route 410.


What do you all think?

Calm Reasoning in Dialogue

The beauty of formal logic is that it leaves no room for wildly radical statements full of informal fallacies. However, this isn't so true in our everyday lives. Sure, sometimes we may be able to have a calm, metered out conversation with people, but sometimes it isn't possible. Take abortion for example. People understandably have strong views on this subject, but when the other side calmly expresses a view, they are often meet with antagonism and shouting.

How exactly are we supposed to remedy this? Is there a way to change our culture so that any discussion, even by the uneducated, can be metered out and mellow? I wonder what lessons we can learn from formal logic to apply to informal conversational argumentation.

Writing Theses in Standard Form--Different than in Other Subjects?

So, for class tomorrow we need, as you all know, to write out our arguments in standard form with all that entails. It seems that at this point, without writing a full essay, we still have several lines of argumentation that all lead up to our conclusion, and this is our thesis. However, this seems very different than theses that I've written for other classes.


Below is a thesis for a paper that I took to a national undergraduate research conference:

         Though the anti-forced busing movement of the 1970s in Boston was in part a result of          racism, there were other key factors such as the concept of defended neighborhoods,             various sociological issues regarding city structure, white poverty, and issues         
        regarding unequal treatment between white and black children that were equally as      
        important which lead Bostonians to their fierce opposition of the policy.

Now, I guess I personally feel that this thesis is different than the ones we're structuring for class. However, is my thesis a bit more truncated than the ones we're supposed to be doing? Maybe each section separated by a comma can be expanded into its own sentence and line or argument. Who knows?

The GRE's and Logic

A friend of mine too the GRE this past saturday, and her "argumentative" essay question was pretty fascinating for us budding logicians. I'll briefly explain the argument, and go from there.

To condense the prompt, the argument is as follows:

P1. If you give students less homework, they will get better grades.
P2 The students got better grades.
Conclusion. It was because the students received less homework.


Now, that is the fallacy of affirming the consequent, which we all know is a big no-no. But, what are we to do when we come across arguments that are formally invalid? Well, I was speaking to Matt after class today, and he suggested that the next step is to allow for intellectual charity and try to help revise the argument in a way that makes sense.

I'm not sure where I was going with this post, but I found it interesting for the course!

Determining True Premises

One of the really wonderful things about formal logic is that when the argument is structured properly, and the premises are true, we can believe with great amounts of confidence that the argument is valid and therefore the answer is true. However, there is the problem of the premises themselves.

How, exactly, are we to determine whether or not a given premise is true? I mean, we can't really use Formal Logic and deductively prove a premise; that would just exponentiate the problem. Is there a particular means in logic to show that a given premise is actually true? If there isn't, what hope do we have of learning anything about the world from Formal Logic?

The Inclusive "Or"

I found it really fascinating in our class experience that the "Or" function can also include both ideas. for example PvQ could also be P and Q. Why exactly do we use that function and what sense does it really make? Obviously, it make's DeMorgan's make sense, but it seems like there must be an actual reason for the inclusion.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the ancient Greek Stoics used the "Or" function in the exclusive, and it seems that modern English language conventions do the same. So, why the change?