You guys must have been hiding the bible of logic somewhere for the past couple centuries.
Maths teachers teach you how to do maths, the same way that driving instructors teach you how to drive. They make you lots of maths questions, until doing maths the right way becomes second nature.
I had a think about this. You're using logic as if it's a set of formulas that you can memorise and use without any comprehension.
I feel like my characterization of logic illustrate exactly why logic no matter how obvious should be inspected and judged in accordance to reality.
That's normally what you do when solving a maths question. You double-check, by looking at your answer and checking if it's in the same ball park as what you'd expect the answer to be. If it's in the same ball-park, then as long as your logic is not flawed, you normally have the right answer.
You have already brought up this argument in a different thread. You're not turning the tables on anyone here, you have actively expressed your fantasy of harming "bullies" before, I know for a fact you get emotional in these conversations. That is here nor there, when I am the target of it, I will take issue with it.
You've already written before that you're going to keep repeating yourself until others give in. However, in maths, you keep getting told off for accepting other's claims, until it stops being part of your psyche. So you can keep saying this over and over. But it won't change how I think.
It might make me give up on telling you. But that won't change my viewpoint. It will just mean I think that there's no point in correcting you, and at that point, if you are about to do something monumentally self-destructive, I will also probably lack the motivation to tell you not to do that as well.
Your funeral.
No such thing as "argumentation". You've just made that up, because without logic, you don't have any basis for making an argument.
That characterization of argumentation is interesting. I would agree with it.
Not with the idea that argumentation is something "(that I) just made -up".
I was not suggesting that the concept was invented by yourself, merely the word you use to label the concept, so you don't have to spend 50 words every time you want to talk about making rational arguments about an issue.
All of the symbols in logic are of exactly the same nature: taking existing concepts, and using symbols to describe them, so we can shorten mathematical proofs and theorems.
An example is "=", which is pronounced "equals" in English, and is shorthand for what humans mean by "equals". Another example is "+" which is pronounced "plus", which is shorthand for the general properties of the operator used in addition.
I actually had one maths course which was given entirely in words. So maths isn't about symbolic logic. It's just much more concise when written in symbols.
Logic is a (description of a) set of relationships. You can interchange logic with set of relationships, yes or no?
No.
If we take your definition of "argumentation" for example, then logic is a particular subset of argumentation that is "
rigorous argumentation". To be rigorous, means that you are extremely thorough and careful.
For example:
You can build a bridge in 3 days.
Or, you can take your time to check that each and every component of the bridge is strong enough and reliable enough to safely and consistently support the load it is expected to hold, and then to check that all the components fit the components they connect to, so that the load is transferred properly, until you can be certain that the bridge will definitely support the load that it is designed to support, which might take 3 months.
Now, if you build the bridge quickly but not rigorously, then it will probably hold in a light breeze. But if it's supposed to withstand a hurricane, some of the support beams may not be quite as strong as they're supposed to be, because steel strength is actually calculated on an average basis, and not per component, and so they might buckle. Then in a real hurricane, sometimes the bridge will stand. In another hurricane, some of the support beams may buckle and the whole bridge collapses, killing the people who are still trying to get off the bridge.
But if you take the rigorous approach, then the bridge will definitely hold in any hurricane, because that's how it was designed, and the bridge-builders checked every component, and even the connections between the components. So then you have nothing to worry about.
Logic is about taking that same rigorous approach to argumentation. IRL, some arguments in argumentation turn out to be true. Others appear solid, but turn out to be false. In logic, if you cannot be certain that your argument is completely & rigorously true, because you have not checked it rigorously, you are supposed to reject the argument.
The argument may be true anyway. But it's not RIGOROUSLY true. So there's a chance it may be wrong. So in logic, you are supposed to throw it out.
But if you take the rigorous approach, it can take years to prove even a single theorem. So a long time ago, logicians developed symbols to express certain concepts in logic, and took a long time to prove the rules between them in a rigorous manner. So if you've been taught many of those rules, you can vastly speed up the process of proving something rigorously, from a year to maybe a few months, maybe even a few weeks.
But you are still expected to understand those rules, and to prove them, and to be able to prove your argument in a rigorous fashion without those rules anyway.
Now, if you take the rigorous approach, you will find that there's a lot you cannot prove rigorously. If you want to prove heliocentrism, you have to assume that there is such a thing as the Sun, even though no-one has ever been to the Sun, or even touched the Sun, and so it might be a mass hallucination.
So in logic, you would say something like "assuming that there is a Sun and an Earth, then the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit", because if you just assume there is a sun without stating your assumptions, then you're not really being that rigorous.
So in THAT sense, you can only really talk rigorously about arguments when you are discussing relationships between things.
But it's not about relationships per se. It's really about making sure that your arguments have been verified RIGOROUSLY.
The relationship between argumentation and logic is thus a similar relationship between casual observation and scientific experimentation. The latter is a LOT more precise and careful than the former.
@LOGICZOMBIE seemed to be allergic to answering this question.
He might have avoided it, because as I wrote earlier, there is a connection between relationships and logic, when really, logic is not about that at all.
But the reality is that you have exactly the same problem with argumentation: any argument is really about the relationships between things. So the issue about logic being about relationships is not to do with logic per se, but about any sort of argument or line of reasoning.
Here you seem to be trying to get some authoritative ground? I don't know, you easily could've left it out. Stating the obvious is just redundant.
It's not obvious. It may seem obvious. But then you've missed the point that I am making here.
The point is, that if you had solved as many logic problems in the Logic Problems puzzle books as I did, and did as much maths as I have, you would have found the same things that I did.
But you should not take my word for it. Also, you don't have to. You can just solve lots of logic problems in puzzle books and do lots and lots of maths. That will prove things for yourself, and will show you for certain if what I say is correct.
If I invoke a hypothetical like the trolley problem to illustrate how impossible it is to make a perfect moral judgment at a given moment, and you say that the invoking the trolley problem is a fallacy, I would call you thick.
The point isn't the trolley problem should be taken as something we actually worry about, it is just a device to exemplify something.
Sure. But what exactly are you exemplifying? That we should worry about the Trolley Problem, because you find yourself in such a situation 10 times a day? You said we should NOT worry about it. But if it happens often, then we'd have to deal with it, and so would have to be concerned with it, right?
So presumably, your reasons for saying we shouldn't have to worry about it, is because it hardly ever happens, right?
But if it hardly ever happens, then who cares about it or what it exemplifies? It almost never happens anyway.
Rather, the whole point of an example, is to indicate something about all the
other situations that are like it, that do occur often, and so thus indicate that what is true about the example, is also true about all the
other problems that are like it.
Since the Trolley Problem is about a moral issue, and it highlights the impossibility of picking an answer, as an example, it serves to indicate all moral questions other than the Trolley Problem are equally problematic, and thus all questions of morality equally havean impossibility of picking an answer.
An example: some terrorists hijack an airplane full of hundreds of passengers and now are aiming it at a skyscraper that has thousands of people. Do you blow up the plane or not? If you blow up the plane, you've deliberately killed hundreds of people. If you don't blow up the plane, you've deliberately allowed the terrorists to kill thousands of people.
If the decision is such that it is impossible to choose an answer, then your hands are tied, and you have to sit there in horror as you watch the aircraft plough into the skyscraper and watch as thousands die.
Do you bomb the country that sent those terrorists and get rid of the terrorist group that sent them? If you do, you'll probably end up bombing and killing a lot more than the terrorists. Again, you may kill 10 to 100 times as many innocent people as the murderers. Same problem. If the choice is impossible, you cannot act.
But these are problems LIKE the Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem does not serve as an example there.
Rather it serves as an example when it comes to the rape and murder of a child. Is it moral to ban the rape and murder of children? You've just given an example to exemplify that it's impossible to make definitive choices when it comes to morality. So then you can't make it illegal to rape and murder children.
Then every moral choice becomes allowed. Paedophiles and murderers can do as they want in your country, because you won't lift a finger to stop them.
So the Trolley Problem really serves as an example of why you should
not learn anything about morality from the Trolley Problem.
I am exemplifying something with my "fallacious" example.
Yes, you are.
What you are exemplifying, is that anyone with even the level of intelligence of a 10-year-old can make up an argument why 1 = 0, why the Sun goes around the Earth, why medicine is the work of the devil, why the only reasonable and moral form of government is a violent dictatorship, and anything else they feel like.
They can do that with any argument without going near logic, because argumentation without logic is just any argument which you are not careful about, and that allows for far more arguments than would be allowed under logic.
So it's not logic per se that is flawed, but argumentation as a whole that is flawed, and flawed so horribly, that almost anything can be justified using argumentation, however stupid those arguments are, and however sick and twisted those arguments are.
Hitler's arguments would be justified under argumentation.
At least with logic, you have a
chance of proving Hitler wrong, because logic has to be rigorous, i.e. logical arguments have to be carefully examined, and if there is even the slightest flaw, they have to be thrown out.
Well if it's any consolation, I haven't gotten much from this at all.
You will. I'm 54 years old. I've seen enough in my time to show me the value of logic. By the time you're my age, you'll have seen a lot worse, and realise the dangers of following argumentation that doesn't conform to logic.
You don't need to believe me either. You'll see that for yourself in good time.
I'm happy that the depths of something that I have conversed with several other intellectual minds on several occasions, was able to shake something loose in your head.
It has. It's explained to me why the world is in the sorry state it is in, and why so many horrible things seem to happen, that people keep being surprised at, and don't seem to have any good ways to solve.
They, like you, believe that there is little value in logic. So they resort to argumentation to justify their views, when argumentation has no rigour, no care and concern to make sure that their arguments are correct.
So they come up with all sorts of new ideas to solve the world's problems, which all sound good. But then a few years later, even worse problems come up, which all can be explained by the use of logic, which demonstrates clearly that their "solutions" caused the worse problems to happen. So they've actually made things much WORSE by their "solutions".
They can't even solve these new problems that they created. Why? Because these problems can't be solved by their existing approaches. So if they CAN be solved, it would have to be by solutions that they'd normally never consider. But to get a solution like that to work, you'd have to check it rigorously, which requires logic, which they've abandoned. So the problems go on and on, or get worse and worse.
Nothing gets better. Everything gets worse.
Then you wonder why Boomers had it soooo much better.
I don't. I can see why. Boomers believed in the merits of logic, and your generation don't. So Boomers did
some things that had a chance of working, but your generation don't do anything that stands any chance of working, not without making things much, much worse.
So nothing gets better. Everything gets worse, and thus previous generations like the Boomers had it much better than later generations like Millennials and Gen Z.
