Has anyone considered what logic is?

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Wes Bucey

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#13
My oldest daughter has been living in the Dallas - Fort Worth Texas area for over 25 years. When she is speaking to me alone she may say, "Do you all want a beer?" When she is speaking to a group that includes me, she says, "Do all you all want a beer?"

Those regionalism language quirks will drive any logician crazy!

My answer, regardless of how many in the group my daughter addresses is always, "YES!" (because I'll drink the beer of any teetotalers plus my own.)
 

john.b

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#14
I took some logic classes in college studying philosophy so I'd love to ramble on a bit about this subject.

As I understand it academic logic means two things: rhetoric (related to fallacies in arguments), and symbollic logic, the attempt to capture reasoning forms used in arguments in a form not so different than mathematics or algebra. Logic can also relate to digital circuitry design but that's a different thing.

In philosophy they aren't very concerned with the rhetoric forms but they are actually more useful, even if the focus there is on very basic reasoning structures that don't work. The most symbollic version is always taught but it doesn't actually relate to arguments made in real life very well. People have tried to reduce normal reasoning and text to a logical mapping but that doesn't work either because what people say is a lot more complicated than normal true / false relationships, and without clear enough dependency structures.

It's an interesting consideration if people really are logical (do they depend on reason; is what they do generally explainable by reasoning). My take: of course not. We can try to justify what we do in retrospect by clear explanation but most of how we relate to others and reality is about fulfilling desires or conforming to obligations that don't explain all that well, and definitely not in a binary true/false format.

About the initial story (3 guys walk into a bar), the logic seems to work there to me, their answers were right. It relates to mapping the original question to how abstract logic actually works, which is a slightly different thing than ordinary use of reason. If the question was "do you all want a beer" either of the first two could only answer "I don't know" or "no" since the question was inclusive (eg. T=T+T+T or F=F+T/F+T/F).
 
P

Pelaminoskep

#15
Actually you did a pretty good job explaining it the first time. 100% logic, absolutely black and white.

I do think Michael has a point though. At our core, we are not logical thinkers, we are empiricists, inductivists. We think bottom up. "Hey, I saw 100 white swans and not a single black one. Therefore all swans must be white.". During our evolution we've rarely had the chance to truly deduce knowledge based on our observations, because the only logic thing you can deduce, is you cannot truly deduce anything valuable based on a finite set of observations. Therefore, survival of the fittest did not select for deductive reasoning and as such, it isn't part of our 'design'.

The real question is then, why can we do it after all? Is it a byproduct of our evolved intelligence, or am I wrong and was there a (or more) specific advantage of being able to make logical deductions?

Can you think of a situation, in which it would make a difference in our survival chances (or REDACTED reproduction), if we were able to make logical deductions? (aside from empiric inductions, which are in my opinion, never true deductions)
 

Wes Bucey

Quite Involved in Discussions
#16
Of course, I recall the one time signoff of a Cove member, Rob Nix, who hasn't been around for a while:

"A termite walks into a tavern and asks, "Where is the bar tender?'"

Does that joke defy logic?
 
R

Roger1723

#17
Found this in a book on decision making. The human brain is essentially capable of two kinds of thougts or response: logical or emotional. We get in trouble when we use the "wrong" kind. If we use emotional responses when rational is needed, we get into trouble, if we use rational response when emotional is needed we get in trouble.

How many meetings have you sat throught when "rational" was needed and what was being offered was drama, rantings, anger?

Logical can just mean a rational approach, free from inappropriate emotions.

Just saying.
 

TPMB4

Quite Involved in Discussions
#18
The "all swans are white" logic really happened in science. It was once treated as fact in western europe in the early days when natural sciences were developing into modern science. I believe there were nature books published saying that. Think i heard it was a shock and not really believed when the first black swan sample was captured.
 

john.b

Involved In Discussions
#19
I really could go on and on about this subject (I used to be a philosopher, sort of), and I love the question about the survival value of abstract logical thought.

The value in abstract reasoning is clear enough; whoever first developed agriculture or used tools to make fire was thinking abstractly. But that wasn't exactly logic. It seems possible symbollic logic has pushed reason past the forms where it actually makes sense. It's interesting to sit through advanced philosophy classes and see how this can play out, and even these don't really directly apply logic in the same forms. Even if they did one clear premise is that real life and grad-school-level philosophy are two completely different things, not closely related.

It's interesting to also consider the role of emotions in survival, sort of the opposite question. It's obvious enough how anger and fear play a role in fight or flight responses, very productive for survival unless applied incorrectly, and then likely to go very badly. But what about happiness; does it help you survive? In a more vague and general sense one might answer we wouldn't want to survive without happiness but that's not understanding the question; what purpose did it serve to evolve into a key aspect of human experience in the form it did.

I have my own thoughts on this but it starts to drift a bit even as this discussion goes. My take (which likely won't be clear at a glance): positive emotions also condition response patterns; it's just not as clear how that works. Regarded only as reward mechanisms you're back to these not clearly serving a necessary purpose. Animals can be content but not happy in the same ways and forms we can, so it's either something very useful or an interesting off-shoot of other forms of complex thought.

To circle back to the original questions about purpose of logic, I don't think formal logical forms represent our own actual thinking process directly enough to be very useful. In a more general form logic is very practical and functional (one idea follows from another, or one concept implies an assumption), just the more abstract philosophical forms seem to drift a bit (my take).
 
P

Pelaminoskep

#20
I think with regards to the human mind, there's a difference between logic and rational thinking. If you divide human responses in two ways like Roger mentioned, it should be emotional versus rational, not emotional versus logical.

Rational means: with application of the ratio. This is essentially thinking-related. Rationality cannot exist without the mind. In that sense, rationality is a product of evolution.
Logic is not. Logic exists in a mathematical world, not necessarily in a thinking one. One might even say that logic can exist without someone excersising it (although that's an entirely different discussion). And it is evolution that follows a logic process, not the other way round.

Added later:
It might just be that logic reasoning did not appear during our evolution for making truth statements about empirical observations (although I do think that has reproductive value, which supercedes survival value). Rather, as true logic is, it enabled humans to make absolute statements about what was not true.

"Hey, I saw a black swan the other day, therefore, not all swans are white"
 
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