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http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=935
In Defense of Logic
by Steven Yates
[Posted April 17, 2002]
<http://www.mises.org/images/thinker.gif> In the opening remarks of Ludwig von
Mises's first formal seminar in America, the revered teacher held up a copy of a book
and announced: "to understand economics, this is the book you should read first."
According to Mises's student and friend George Koether, the book he was holding was An
Introduction to Logic and Scientific Thought by MorrisCohen and Ernest Nagel, first
published in 1934 and now out of print.
Even in 1944, Mises must have sensed that formal instruction in logic, particularly as
it relates to the social sciences, was in decline. Today, it has almost completely
collapsed. This is not to say that one cannot find courses in logic on college and
university campuses. But these courses are little more than decorations. Students take
them to avoid having to take mathematics. They are given symbols and sets of rules for
how to "work proofs." There is no implication of larger issues involved. Brighter
students inevitably come away with the sense of having just wasted time on a game.
Meanwhile, the polylogism Mises refuted in Human Action is everywhere. While 60 years
ago it took the form of classical Marxism, today we have multiculturalism, radical
feminism, and even "queer theory" with their suggestions that each group has its own
"logic." The idea of a single logic is presented as nothing more than a Western
white-male prejudice-a Eurocentric point of view.
As a philosopher who taught classical Aristotelian logic for more than five years at
three different universities, I sometimes wonder whether there is even room for the
subject on campus today. A professor of philosophy who sees logic as doing more for
students than giving them a semester of busywork could easily find his employment in
jeopardy. This article begins this philosopher's campaign to rectify this unfortunate
situation. We need to defend logic!
First, what is logic? As a discipline, logic goes back to the ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was not inventing a game. He saw logic as central to
proper human thought, because reality itself conformed to logical principles (this is
how we would put it today). The ability to reason was what separated us from the
animals. Western civilization got its start with the application of logical thought to
the world around us, ranging from scientific explanation to the development of
commerce.
Western civilization is also fundamentally Christian. When the great medieval
philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas merged Aristotelian thought with Christian theology,
the long-term result was modern science. Science developed in the West and nowhere
else, because nowhere else did human beings have the idea that the fundamental
workings of the world were comprehensible. We had this idea because we believed it was
created by a rational God who also created us with rational minds. Our minds were
capable of comprehending the world's order, at least in part, through-what else?-the
judicious application of logic.
A good formal definition of logic is: the discipline concerned with the study and
evaluation of reasoning. One may consult any number of textbooks on the subject. They
all present some variant of this basic definition, which also implies evaluation of
one's use of language. Reasoning is usually expressed as arguments and inferences.
Note this use of argument first. As the logician uses the term, it does not mean a
disagreement (much less what happens on campuses today when radical activists
encounter an idea they disagree with). It refers to a set of statements. At least one
of these statements is called the argument's premise(s). A premise is an argument's
starting point. The premises of an argument are offered as evidence in support of its
conclusion-the statement the argument is intended to establish. Good, sound reasoning
occurs when a person infers a conclusion from true, meaningful premises, and when we
evaluate the inference or act of reasoning we see that it hangs together properly.
There are a number of implications here-all of them at odds with the major tendencies
of the day.
First is the idea that words (such as those forming the technical vocabulary of logic)
indeed do have reasonably precise meanings and that there are definite cognitive
rights and wrongs. Some statements are true; others are false, period.
Second is the implication that arguments and evidence matter-it is not sufficient
simply to assert what one wants to be true or feels is true. While we may disagree
over cases, or over whether evidence really supports a conclusion, logic is not about
feelings; it is about evaluating instances of reasoning and uses of language.
Third is the focus on the evaluative component. Logic doesn't concern itself with how
people actually do think, even when they know not to rely on feelings. It lays out
rules to determine whether or not their thinking is correct. Not just any premises
will support any conclusion.
One of the most important components of a course in logic involves identifying the
rules determining whether an argument or inference is valid-that is, whether its
premise(s) indeed establishes its conclusion. These rules are given names used as
justification for judging someone's argument.
In teaching logic, after setting out a number of basic definitions (argument itself,
premise, conclusion, deduction, inference, valid, and so on) and explaining what they
refer to, one ought to turn to Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction, which stands
at the foundation of Aristotelian classical logic. Aristotle had a typically
Aristotelian way of expressing it:
[T]he same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject
and in the same respect; ... For it is impossible for any one to believe the same
thing to be and not to be,... and if it is impossible that contrary attributes should
belong at the same time to the same subject ... and if an opinion which contradicts
another is contrary to it, obviously it impossible for the same man at the same time
to believe the same thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this
point he would have contrary opinions at the same time.... (Metaphysics, Book IV,
Chapter 3, Richard McKeon edition.)
In plain English: All contradictory statements and beliefs are false. This is common
horse sense, is it not? There can't both be and not be houses on Elm Street. Either
there are or there aren't. Why belabor this? Because many "postmodernist" academic
thinkers (I use this last term loosely) write as if they believe otherwise. They say
that the above statement is a product of Western "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism."
What do such claims really mean. That in some multiculturalist or de-Westernized
environment devoid of "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism," there can both be and not be
houses on Elm Street? It isn't clear to me what would happen if a student, imbibed on
too much Aristotle, were to ask a multiculturalist philosophy professor such a
question. One suspects the student wouldn't ask, if he valued his grade.
A device I frequently used in teaching logic I called the semantic triangle (semantics
being a branch of philosophical logic concerned with the relationship between language
and the world). This device made its practical import clear. More a device for
classification and organization than evaluation of arguments, the semantic triangle
distinguishes between terms and sentences (linguistic entities generally), ideas or
categories or propositions or theories (conceptual entities generally) and objects and
classes of objects by type (material entities or classes of such entities generally).
Words and sentences are not the same things as concepts; concepts are not the same
things as objects. Words refer to objects, but are not themselves objects. Moreover,
sentences and propositions are not the same thing: it is raining and il pleut are
quite different sentences but express the same proposition. A theory (a set of
propositions) is not simply a set of sentences on paper-if I write out a set of
sentences expressing Newton's theory of universal gravitation and then burn it, I have
not thereby burned up and destroyed Newton's theory.
And there is a difference between a theory and what a theory is about (some subject
matter in the world). Neither ideas nor the world somehow reduce to language, no
matter what the followers of Derrida say. By charting and studying the relationships
this device sets up, students are able to come to grips with how words and ideas are
organized and how they relate to the world, including subject matters of other courses
ranging from foreign languages to science and technology. The difference between good,
informative genus-and-difference definitions (my initial definition of logic
exemplifies this method of defining) and merely pointing and saying, "That's what one
of those things looks like," falls into place.
Students who had been enrolled in one of my logic classes sometimes came to me a
semester later and told me how useful the course had been, however esoteric it seemed
at the time. (It might be useful to note that some of these students were majoring in
subjects like chemical engineering. They were quite bright and very articulate. Had
the course not been useful to them, one can rest assured I would have heard about it!)
Another useful topic for a logic course is basic statistical literacy. Statistical
arguments form one species of arguments that establish their conclusions not
absolutely but only to some degree of probability-inductive arguments, we
logic-teacher types call them. We contrast these with deductive arguments that
establish their conclusions absolutely if their premises are true. Other
inductive-argument forms include enumerations, analogies, inferences to the next case,
and many scientific generalizations.
A nice little book I used once or twice was Darrell Huff's absorbing How To Lie With
Statistics. It enumerated the things that can go wrong in a statistical argument. Your
sample size can be too small. Can we generalize, for example, from a statement about a
few people living in my apartment complex in Auburn, Alabama, to a conclusion about
the population of small-town America as a whole? Or one's sample can be selective:
would we really want to rely on a statistical generalization about political beliefs
in Americaa generally based on a sample of university professors? I certainly hope not!
One can use misleading charts or graphs, or draw a relationship between two sets of
events and argue that because the one precedes the other it causes the other (a
mistake sometimes known as post hoc ergo promter hoc-or, after this therefore because
of this). For example, even if some climatologists claim that summers are getting
hotter, it would not follow without a lot of additional evidence that human activity
is responsible-the "global warming" argument in a nutshell.
This example commits one of our earlier blunders as well-by simply ignoring scientists
who question the premise that the earth is really heating up. Reliable temperature
records only go back so far, and tree rings may tell a quite different story. One of
the dirty little secrets of statistics is that it is often very hard to get a good
sample that is both large enough and sufficiently free of biases of one sort or
another.
Finally, a topic very much worth canvassing in a standard, university-level logic
course is the fallacy--a generic term for any mistake in reasoning or disputation. We
just considered some statistical fallacies, but there are many other ways an argument
can go wrong. We give informal fallacies names to make them easier to spot. Some are
quite common. An ad hominem does not evaluate a person's argument but attacks the
person who made it. Think of every time someone responds to a criticism of affirmative
action with, "You must be a closet racist bigot," or the equivalent. Name-calling is a
typical ad hominem tactic.
Ad hominem has several more subtle varieties. "Isn't he associated with the Mises
Institute?" Used as a rejoinder to some substantive argument, it doesn't engage what
was concluded, or how well argued. In one way or another, it attacks the
speaker-sometimes by attacking his associations (a ploy called guilt by association)
or describing his circumstances so as to insinuate that he cannot be objective ("the
Mises Institute is currently paying your salary; naturally you're going to say that").
Other common informal fallacies include circular reasoning or begging the question, in
which the argument's conclusion is smuggled into the premises. Christians, for
example, should not rely exclusively on the Bible to argue for the divine inspiration
of the Bible, not if they can draw on history, archeology, transformed lives, or other
sources of evidence.
A red herring diverts attention from the main issue onto a side issue. Defenders of
Bill Clinton committed a red herring when they accused Republicans of being obsessed
with sex when the real issues were Clinton's having lied under oath to a grand jury
and having obstructed justice.
Misuse of authority appeals to an authority in order to stop a discussion, to the
wrong sort of authority to establish a conclusion possibly in the absence of evidence,
or to a supposed authority who is obviously biased. Of course, many arguments making
use of authority in one way or another are entirely rational if the authority is
knowledgeable and one has no reason to question his or their motives. An argument from
authority operates on the assumption that the authority has the evidence relevant to
establishing the argument's conclusion. No one has the time or inclination to become
an expert on everything, and in our cognitive division of labor, we often have to rely
on the expertise of others. Recognizing that some appeals to authority are not
fallacious acknowledges this.
More fallacies: an argument from ignorance treats lack of proof of a negative as if it
were positive evidence ("Space aliens might be real, because no one has ever proved
they aren't"). A caution is in order, however: In an argument, the burden of evidence
is on the claimant. If the claimant fails to produce the evidence that would establish
his conclusion after repeated and perhaps exhaustive attempts, this may be the basis
for an inductive argument that the conclusion is untrue and that attempts to establish
it ought to be abandoned.
An appeal to pity or emotion plays on feelings and uses them as evidence ("Gee,
officer, if I have to pay this ticket I won't be able to take my child to the doctor
tomorrow," or "our ancestors were slaves; look how behind we are economically. Poor
us--we are entitled to reparations"). Again: emotions are not evidence. Threats,
efforts to intimidate, etc., are related to appeals to pity in that they attempt to
compel belief without evidence.
A strawman attacks, not an actual argument that anyone makes or stance that anyone
holds, but a grotesquely oversimplified version of it. Consider the person who asks
libertarians, "Aren't you guys really just Republicans who want to smoke dope
legally?" Strawmen may result from mere failures to do one's homework when evaluating
someone else's stance, or they may be products of deliberate efforts to mislead and
misdirect.
An equivocation uses a term in such a way that it could have more than one meaning.
Words like nondiscrimination are particularly vulnerable to equivocal usagesin any
given usage; does it mean race-blindness or in practice is discrimination against
white males (especially non-leftist white males) encompassed by its meaning? What may
open the door to equivocation, particularly in debates over policy, is the failure to
give a term a precise meaning in the first place; this was the case with affirmative
action.
Finally, there is the horselaugh-named for H.L.Mencken, who (unfortunately) once
asserted that "One good horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms." ("Darwinian
evolution possibly false? Oh, c'mon, you can't be serious! Hahahahahaha!")
This is just a generous sampling; there are many more. Entire books have been written
about fallacies. One wonders how many of them are opened today, or if they are just
gathering dust on college and university library shelves.
Once we take all this seriously, we have to throw out a lot of what passes for
scholarship today-and very possibly, a lot of teaching as well, to the extent that it
has come to express the teacher's feelings or attempt to elicit feelings from students
instead of to address facts of reality. Moreover, if a student begins a sentence with,
"Well, I just feel that . . . " a professor who is thinking logically has no choice
but to respond, "This course is not about your feelings." Where logic is taken
seriously, correct thinking is what counts-not feelings. On this point, Ayn Rand and
her followers got it right: Emotions are not tools of cognition.
Now consider one of the dominant doctrines on campus today: multiculturalism. How does
it hold up, logically? One of the basic ideas behind multiculturalism is that every
culture, racial grouping, etc., has its own experience and defines its own truth or
reality. One question a logical mind may want to raise is: In this case, what is the
status of the multiculturalist thesis itself?
Do we get different "multicultural truths" for black multiculturalists, Hispanic
multiculturalists, Asian multiculturalists, queer-studies multiculturalists, and so
on? Is "academic culture" itself a valid culture of sorts? If so, the culture of
academic multiculturalists can define "multicultural truth." But in that case, what
they define wouldn't necessarily hold for those of us subsisting in "nonacademic
culture" (also known as the real world).
Perhaps the multiculturalist thesis is that "all cultures are equal, or morally
equivalent." In this case, the culture of non-multiculturalists is morally equal to
that of multiculturalists, and there is no reason to prefer the latter to the former.
In any case, multiculturalism is destroyed by its own internal logic. Of course, maybe
this doesn't reflect the actual consequences of multiculturalism. Most
multiculturalists are such unclear reasoners that it is difficult to tell what their
statements imply or don't imply.
Again, many see logic-and therefore critiques of this sort-as Western bias. Or to put
the matter another way, refusing to allow contradictory claims and arguments into our
worldview is a sign of Western bias. In that case, they are open to the charge of
having implied that cultures both do and do not define their own truth, are both equal
and unequal, and maybe that there both are and are no houses on Elm Street. All of
which really helps make sense of multiculturalism.
Of course, some will wonder: why these logical contortions? Why not just ask: where,
anywhere in the world, has a multicultural society actually worked? Shouldn't the
burden of argument be on the multiculturalist? Agreed. It should be, and in academies
where rationality was the norm and not the exception, it would be.
The point is, we can show that given any clear formulation, the idea unravels.
Educated people should understand that multiculturalism is just the current species of
intellectual relativism--what Mises called polylogism--and that whatever predicaments
polylogism is in will be transferred to multiculturalism. A rational mind shouldn't be
tempted by it in any guise.
Any stance that relativizes truth to some framework dividing the human race into
collectives (a theory, worldview, paradigm, culture, race, gender, sexual preference
or preference for decaf) invalidates itself from within by robbing the stance of any
cognitive claim on anyone outside the framework's adherents. If "feminist
epistemologists" claim that men and women experience the world in different ways by
virtue of women's being an oppressed group, they cannot simultaneously claim that a
"female-friendly science," whatever it would be, would be superior to or have any
claim on the allegiance of men. Polylogism is always self-defeating. Socrates wielded
an argument of this kind against the relativism of the sophist Protagoras with great
skill, in one of the most important of Plato's dialogues, the Thaeatetus.
A few decades ago, serious scholars understood logic. Relativism existed, but aside
from a few classical Marxists, it was an off-campus coffeehouse curiosity and not a
serious academic stance. Today, you can present such arguments to tenured professors
and receive blank stares of noncomprehension.
The above, of course, is only a sketch of a broad and once-respected subject. We've
only scratched the surface regarding its applicability to the current crisis in higher
education. But hopefully we've gotten the point across: the study of logic requires
clarity, an exactness of definition, and a precision of thought. It implies better
versus worse in human reasoning, and that what counts in reasoning is evidence, not
emotion. Carried out properly, a course in logic can greatly improve a college
student's ability to think independently, as an individual and not simply a
herd-member, and not be taken to the cleaners by every fashion to come along.
It can be used to show, moreover, that many beliefs currently held dear on campuses
simply don't make any sense when held up to the light of close, logical scrutiny. It
is thus a highly politically incorrect subject.
Mises was right: Logic belongs in the core of any good college or university
curriculum. But it does not fit into an arena where emotions reign, where intimidation
is the preferred method of enforcing conformity, or where "truth" and "right" are
determined by the collective will of agitators-in-training-which is why their
pronouncements offer such a gold mine of examples of horrid reasoning.
What was true in Mises's time remains true in ours: If you really want to understand
economics, or any social science, or really anything at all, you must first nail down
how to tell what is true from what is false, and how to distinguish good arguments
from bogus ones. This means studying and mastering the discipline of logic, and
knowing how to apply it.
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