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?