Over at a blog entitled The Sooty Empiric, the author The Last Positivist has an interesting explanation of the uses and abuses of logic, on the internet. It is interesting, first, because it is interesting ("But aristarchus", you might say, "that is a tautology!" To which I reply, "Yes, it is, and therefore logically true!"), and secondly because the misconception he adresses is rampant here on SoylentNews, as it is elsewhere on the Internets. And thirdly, because it highlights one of the essentials of philosophy: Humility; humility and Socratic ignorance. I'm sure many have noticed my humble attempts to exemplify philosophic humility right here on the pages of SN. But this is not about me. On to the Blog.
Boundless Ocean of Unlimited Possibilities Sometimes (e.g.) on the internet we angst about the kind of person who likes to DESTROY his enemies with FACTS AND LOGIC AND REASON. Ben Shapiro has become the iconic figurehead of this sort, and not without cause - but that is at least somewhat misleading. Shapiro is prominently a fairly traditional conservative in his politics, but that is not an essential property of the sort. It is not tied to any particular political position so much as a self-characterisation and an aesthetic. The self-characterisation is that of an unbiased objective person who calmly follows (to the best of their abilities, accepting human frailty etc) good principles of rationality to reach conclusions. The aesthetic is that of being very impressed by displays of logical acumen, and very persuaded that one's ideological opponents (whoever they may be) can be set aside with relative ease once the tools of reason are brought to bear against them. This post is my contribution to that genre.
The aesthetic of displays of logical acumen, and a faith in victory! I mean, if not for this, conservatives would avoid logic like they do climate science. But let's see where The Last Positivist is going with this.
Now, I am a fan of fairly orthodox notions of logical argumentation. I do in fact think it is a good thing to offer arguments which are perspicuously such that there is no way for their premises to be true while their conclusion is false. All the better if you begin from true premises! Just on this blog I have tried to clarify clarity all the better to achieve it, and put a name to an under-recognised fallacy.
Philosophy vs. Rhetoric
There is a long history of antagonism between reason and argumentation. Plato assigned his protege, Aristotle, to show how the teachers of rhetoric played tricks upon the rest of us. This led to the creation of the discipline of logic. Plato, through his character Socrates in the dialogue "The Symposium", held that "philosophers" were "lovers of wisdom", from the greek φιλος and της σοφίας for "love of" and " of wisdom". But the wise woman Diotima ("honored by the gods") taught Socrates about love, namely, that love is not having what you desire.
Thus, philosophers are "lovers of wisdom" precisely because they do not possess it. And wisdom minimally should contain the truth, and logic (correct reasoning) is a tool for arriving at the truth? Thus one ought to be able to use logic to compel one's misguided and erring opponents to agree with you, using what Jürgen Habermas calls "the forceless force of reason". Of course, if we "other direct" or weaponize logic in this way, we are using logic to win arguments, not to discover truth, and that is rhetoric and not philosophy. And so, our noble blogger's point:
So, after all that set up, and for all my sympathy and similarity to this group, what spurs this post is that I typically find myself totally opposed to the logic fans in aesthetic and self-presentation. Why should this be?
My guess is it comes from a very different idea of what it is that a general improvement in logical acumen would achieve. The internet logic fan imagines that it would often lead to us agreeing on what is true - by contrast, I imagine it would lead to us agreeing on how much we don't know. They imagine it would knock out possibilities, I imagine it would open them up. The rest of this post is just a quick explanation of what I mean here and why I think that.
If we possessed at least some truth, and were able to identify valid deductive arguments, no doubt we could, and indeed be forced to on pain of being irrational, agree on some things being true.
Logic is, among other things, the study of truth preservation. It gives us tools for discerning when it is that some premises being jointly accepted a conclusion cannot be consistently denied. When an argument has this property of its premises ensuring the truth of its conclusion we say it is valid.
But this is not sufficient.
I think the root of the logic fans' vision for logic DESTROYING their enemies is that with it they shall be making arguments that are valid in this sense. In fact there is usually two sides to this. First, their opponents are shown to be not in the business of arguing at all - what "arguments" they offer are little more than emotive pleas (on that contrast see here). And after that these people are sharply contrasted with the airtight reasoning of a scientifically informed and logically precise debater. They thus envision securing agreement by brushing aside their opponents own perspective, then trapping their enemies in the iron grip of a valid argument, and squeezing conclusions out of them whether they like it or not.
A bit more forceful use of reason, aimed not at laying bare the reasoning for our conclusions, but rather at seeking unilateral cause for dismissing our opponents. This is not agreement, it is "victory"!
But validity is only the beginning of wisdom, not its end. For evidently mere validity by itself is not very interesting - we should like to know not just this relationship between the premises and the conclusion, but also whether or not the premises are in fact true. (An argument which is valid and has true premises is known as a sound argument - by their nature, sound arguments must have true conclusions.) In fact, even that is not enough - for logic to really be dialectically effective in this sort of way, it must offer us not just sound arguments, but sound arguments with premises that are known or sufficiently well established to be true that one's opponents cannot very well reasonably deny them.
This is an interesting point, that logic is not agonistic, it is not a battle for the truth. Instead it is a communal search for truth, for agreement, and that means for an argument to be effective, it must be agreed to at the beginning, with the agreement on premises. In other words, διαλεκτική, Dialectic But, then,
And here is where I think the rub lies - I think it is extremely difficult, vanishingly rare in fact, to have arguments which are (i) interesting, (ii) valid, and (iii) possessing premises that are true and established to be so. By (i) I just mean - on the sort of topics that actually concern us in political and social discussion, coming to contentious conclusions about how we should live or arrange our institutions etc. And by (iii) I mean - having premises that are not only true (hard and rare enough in itself in many cases), but are sufficiently well evidenced such that disputants cannot just as reasonably doubt this premise as accept the conclusion.
What, then, is our valiant blogger's alternative?
So to me the more salient tool in the logician's kit is the counter-model. This is the imaginative skill (also taught in intro logic) of coming up with ways the world could be that would satisfy all of the premises while rendering the conclusion false. This shows us possibilities left open by what is established in our premises, sometimes these are ways the world might be that we may not have been inclined to think about were we not set the task of generating a counter-model. When I envision the world wherein logic is better respected, it is a world wherein this skill is more often deployed.
American Philosopher John Rawls once wrote on the situation where there is no forceful argument in favor of liberal democracy and international law:
Some may find this fact hard to accept. That is because it is often thought that the task of philosophy is to uncover a form of argument that will always prove convincing against all other arguments. There is, however, no such argument.
The absence of such arguments is not cause for fear, or rampant relativism. It only means that the force of reason is not what the fanbois of logic on the internet imagine it to be. Logic is not a rhetorical weapon, it is not something that can be used without the consent, agreement, and cooperation of opponents. Which means, ultimately, that we can dismiss Ben Shapiro as a raving emo guy, right?
Logic Wars
Over at a blog entitled The Sooty Empiric, the author The Last Positivist has an interesting explanation of the uses and abuses of logic, on the internet. It is interesting, first, because it is interesting ("But aristarchus", you might say, "that is a tautology!" To which I reply, "Yes, it is, and therefore logically true!"), and secondly because the misconception he adresses is rampant here on SoylentNews, as it is elsewhere on the Internets. And thirdly, because it highlights one of the essentials of philosophy: Humility; humility and Socratic ignorance. I'm sure many have noticed my humble attempts to exemplify philosophic humility right here on the pages of SN. But this is not about me. On to the Blog.
The aesthetic of displays of logical acumen, and a faith in victory! I mean, if not for this, conservatives would avoid logic like they do climate science. But let's see where The Last Positivist is going with this.
Philosophy vs. Rhetoric
There is a long history of antagonism between reason and argumentation. Plato assigned his protege, Aristotle, to show how the teachers of rhetoric played tricks upon the rest of us. This led to the creation of the discipline of logic. Plato, through his character Socrates in the dialogue "The Symposium", held that "philosophers" were "lovers of wisdom", from the greek φιλος and της σοφίας for "love of" and " of wisdom". But the wise woman Diotima ("honored by the gods") taught Socrates about love, namely, that love is not having what you desire.
Thus, philosophers are "lovers of wisdom" precisely because they do not possess it. And wisdom minimally should contain the truth, and logic (correct reasoning) is a tool for arriving at the truth? Thus one ought to be able to use logic to compel one's misguided and erring opponents to agree with you, using what Jürgen Habermas calls "the forceless force of reason". Of course, if we "other direct" or weaponize logic in this way, we are using logic to win arguments, not to discover truth, and that is rhetoric and not philosophy. And so, our noble blogger's point:
If we possessed at least some truth, and were able to identify valid deductive arguments, no doubt we could, and indeed be forced to on pain of being irrational, agree on some things being true.
But this is not sufficient.
A bit more forceful use of reason, aimed not at laying bare the reasoning for our conclusions, but rather at seeking unilateral cause for dismissing our opponents. This is not agreement, it is "victory"!
This is an interesting point, that logic is not agonistic, it is not a battle for the truth. Instead it is a communal search for truth, for agreement, and that means for an argument to be effective, it must be agreed to at the beginning, with the agreement on premises. In other words, διαλεκτική, Dialectic But, then,
What, then, is our valiant blogger's alternative?
American Philosopher John Rawls once wrote on the situation where there is no forceful argument in favor of liberal democracy and international law:
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples", p. 123
The absence of such arguments is not cause for fear, or rampant relativism. It only means that the force of reason is not what the fanbois of logic on the internet imagine it to be. Logic is not a rhetorical weapon, it is not something that can be used without the consent, agreement, and cooperation of opponents. Which means, ultimately, that we can dismiss Ben Shapiro as a raving emo guy, right?
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