Category Archives: Philosophy of Logic

Time (“Chunky style”)

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Whitehead

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Regardless of what Mick said, it is not on your side.

I’ve been in the position to observe a number of significant transitions of late – from which there will be no coming back – and the thought of time is once again on my mind. Saint Augustine – a fairly bright fellow, for a psychotic authoritarian – mused in his Confessions something to the effect (I quote from memory, so this is only analogously correct) that, “As long as no one asks me, I know what time is; as soon as anyone asks, I have no idea.”Hourglass

Time is something like THE fundamental mystery. “Intention” is right up there with it, except that intention is a logical/semantical category, whereas time is more about ontology – what genuinely IS (ontology), rather than what must be taken into account for the rational possibility of inquiry and discourse (logic/semantics). Moreover, it is not clear that intentionality (which includes things like “meaning,” “believing,” “interpreting,” “intending,” “wanting,” and so on) has any logical – much less ontological – possibility, that is not already thoroughly infused with time and temporality. Certainly this seems true in the human world; perhaps gods, devils, and their associated helpmates suffer no such limitations. I should add here that persons involved with phenomenological philosophy would require 200 pages of densely packed and, often enough, uninterpretable obfuscation and hand-wringing to ask the above question; but I am not a phenomenologist, and as such I labor under no such constraints. Continue reading →

The Quantum of Explanation

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic, Whitehead

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Explanations come in discrete units, logically minimum quanta. It is logically impossible for the situation to be otherwise. We can reason about continua of various different kinds (the “continuum” of the Real numbers being a prominent example, although it is to be noted that within that branch of formal logic known as “model theory,” there are examples of continua that are “more continuous” than even the Real numbers.) But we cannot reason “in” a continuum. Our ideas may have vague boundaries, but they are still unitary quanta, or at least collections of such quanta. Our concepts are even more sharply defined. We assemble these units into larger structures that become arguments (in the good, philosophical sense) and, ideally, explanations. But a continuum gives us nothing to work with. Like trying to nail mercury to the wall, every time we attempt to grasp it, it slips around and away in out grasp, so that either we (1) end up speaking about the continuum itself as a whole, at which point the continuum qua whole has become our quantum, (2) we isolate individual points on the continuum, and these become our quanta as we extrapolate connections amongst them, (3) or, alternatively, we end up spouting nothing but nonsense.building-blocks

I’ve touched on this subject before. But rather than making coy suggestions in the final paragraph as a rhetorical flourish, I think it time I spoke to the subject more directly. As is often the case, I’ll barely be able to gloss the topic in this post. But, of course, the whole purpose of a blog post is to provide a small quantum of ideas that might lead interested readers off in interesting directions. Continue reading →

The Logic of Possibility

28 Monday Dec 2015

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There is a large, nested, complexly intersecting, multidimensional area of logic known as “modal logic.” Standard (“assertoric” – dealing with comparatively simple assertions) logic essentially forgoes any considerations of the modes (hence, “modal”) in which an assertion is considered to be true or false; it simply is, or it is not (true or false). Modal logics are intended to examine the ways (modes) in which a proposition or assertion might express such truth or falsity. A great deal of very good work has been done in this area of study, but it remains a long way from solving its most basic problems; indeed, most proposed “solutions” do not so much “solve” their problems as strangle them.i I am at once deeply impressed by the technical sophistication of contemporary work on modality, and profoundly dissatisfied with the narrowness of its vision. Because one of the “modes” in which an assertion or proposition might be true or false is whether it is possibly true or false.baby-steps

I can certainly inundate any interested party with citations, but anyone capable of following those citations would most likely already be familiar with them. It takes years of dedicated study to bootstrap one’s self up through propositional, into quantificational, and finally on to modal logics. On the other hand, it takes nothing more than the most elementary capacity for cognition to instantly see that there is a difference between saying that “X is the case,” and “X might be the case.” Just as we can talk about Jazz without mastering the saxophone, or relativity without deriving proofs related to the Ricci tensor, we can talk about possibility without becoming research mathematicians in formal logic. One might even argue that mastering such mathematics would not ideally equip us to talk about possibility which is, after all, a metaphysical, rather than a mathematical topic. Continue reading →

Proof

12 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Logic

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Nine times out of ten (probably closer to ninety-nine times out of one hundred) when someone starts talking about, much less demanding, “proof” – proof of anything – unless they are discussing whiskey[1], they almost certainly have no idea what they are talking about. This is especially true in the empirical sciences, where various anti- or pseudo-scientific quacks, climate change denialists, creationist ideologues, and others like them, will insist that the fatuous twaddle they are spewing is perfectly reasonable since, after all, they (the quacks) have not been “proven” wrong, while the actual scientific literature has failed to absolutely “prove” its case. These claims are so childish that one must almost wonder if the denialists and others like them might actually know that what they are saying is not just bullshit (that last being a technical, philosophical term), but an outright lie. I am myself, however, disinclined to assign a level of intelligence to people to pull off such a clever conspiracy when nothing else in their lives gives any evidence of such nuanced and incisive reasoning. As a very loose and general rule, people are far for likely to have no idea what they are talking about, as opposed to talking about it very cleverly.Rum Gone

The idea of proof in mathematics (the only venue where non-liquor related uses have any meaning) had become so vexed by the end of the 19th Century, that the field of mathematical logic was, in essence, invented with the purpose of sorting matters out. Matters kept resisting being sorted, and along the way the nose of the mathematical camel got into the philosophical tent, and ended up swallowing philosophical logic whole for some decades that followed. Even today, the issue of how to teach logic, and what logic to teach, has not been particularly well sorted out in philosophy. So what might be said about the nature of proof, such that we do not have to become facile with mathematics, yet can still avoid being gulled by credulously accepting demands for, or putative statements of, proof? Continue reading →

The Nature of Scientific Controversies

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in Climate Change, Creationism, Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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The title of this post is, among other things, a play on Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The purpose of this post is to set out a collection of “quick and dirty” rules of thumb for non-specialists to be able to determine when a putative “controversy” (as reported in the press) is a genuine scientific controversy. DSCF1966Quick and dirty rules of thumb are the best that anyone can ever hope to achieve on this matter, because the determination of genuine versus specious controversy is inherently qualitative and deeply sensitive to context. Nevertheless, a very solid set of evaluative tools can be quickly assembled and mastered with relative ease by anyone prepared to apply logic to facts. This post is something of a “part 2” to my earlier, What is Science?

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What is a Fallacy?

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Logic, Philosophy of Logic

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There are many more ways of reasoning poorly than there are of reasoning well, just as there are vastly more ways of getting lost than there are of proceeding directly to your destination. (A quick note on that last analogy: not every circuitous path is a mistake; depending on time and tide, sometimes there are aesthetic values other than efficiency of travel and timeliness of arrival at play in an actual journey.) Even the most detailed catalog of fallacies must content itself with providing little more than a generic list.Doh My favorites such list is The Fallacy Files; besides their basic list, the Files also provides a well worked out taxonomy. But what is a fallacy? I can give a list of bird species without ever saying what a bird is. The Files do offer an answer to this question, but I wish to propose a slightly different approach. Where I am going is definitely outside the mainstream when it comes to saying what a fallacy is, but I believe a substantive argument can be made for the case I present here.

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HERSTEIN’s FIRST LAW

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Psychology

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Never underestimate human capacity for denial.

I first formulated the above phrase – and flattered myself by naming it – some decades ago; so long, indeed, that I’ve no clear idea when I first said it. Other people have probably said similar things, long before I ever first quipped the idea. But my first contact with the phrase was in my personal act of formulating it. The second person to invent the wheel still invented it if she didn’t know about the first person. The earliest example of the exact quote (it is important that you search on the quote, otherwise the search registers all the words, regardless of their order) that I can find on Google brings up the pseudonym of “Logic Deferred” as first stating the phrase publicly back in February of 2010. Feel free to click on the pseudonym to see who it is that comes up. But as I said, I’ve used the phrase for many decades now.

DerpAnd I am quite sincere about this statement: Never underestimate human capacity for denial. Smart people can be the worst cases when it comes to denial, because rather than using their intelligence for inquiry, they will use it to justify their ideology.

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Open Mindedness

03 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic, Philosophy of Logic

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What does it mean to be “open” minded? Open mindedness is supposed to be found at some far end of (some) spectrum (or other) from “closed” mindedness. But what “spectrum,” and what “end”?

There is a saying – variously and unreliably attributed to everyone and no one in particular – that many people would profit from taking to heart: “One ought to have an open mind, but not so open that one’s brains fall out.”

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Closed Mindedness

25 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Genetic Fallacy, GMO crops, Philosophy of Logic

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Claims about “closed” and “open” mindedness get tossed about with considerable enthusiasm, with the former being BAD and the latter being GOOD. Many of those tossing the terms about are persons who either object to, or have little or not capacity for, basic logical rigor or critical thinking. There are concepts involved that do merit rather more praise or blame than purely neutral indifference, but matters are a little more subtle than folks sometimes allow. This seems like a good time to touch on these subjects.

Closed mindedness, in its severest form, is straight-out dogmatism. Dogmatism is one of the seven categories Robert Altemeyer uses in characterizing authoritarian style thought processes in his book. Given that I’ve touched on some of Altemeyers ideas in these previous posts, it might seem more natural to include a discussion of dogmatism with that collection. However, for my discussion here it is more appropriate to pair the concepts of open and closed mindedness with one another (which Altemeyer does not particularly do), and the specific concept of closed mindedness I’ll be looking at here is rather more than just the extreme case of dogmatism. But dogmatism is certainly a case – an extreme one – of closed mindedness, and by the nature of its extremity it draws the lines of our topic in particularly sharp relief. So let us begin there.

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