Logic is a fascinating tool for distilling the gist-the truth, falsehood and accuracy of written points and perhaps not so much of spoken words, since demotic rave talk and hurry-up inaccuracy plus shortcuts and implicit assumptions that the listener is familiar with the situation hold it to a lower standard of accuracy in explicit meaning commonly. Since it’s about the end of 2013 it’s worth mentioning logical fallacies, what they are and why they are so much fun.
Wikipedia and many other sites have lists of logical fallacies. One doesn’t need to read a text on classical and symbolic logic to benefit from learning what logical fallacies and how to recognize them. Here is a list from a Wikipedia article of basic categories of fallacies though there are numerous other ways of describing them.
Formal Fallacies
Propositional Fallacies
Quantification fallacies
Formal syllogistic fallacies
Informal fallacies
A syllogism is an abstract method for reducing arguments made in language to a simple structure that can be tested for truth value. There are 256 possible forms of syllogism and just 23 are valid. In a text named ‘Elements of Logic’ the philosopher W.V.O. Quine demonstrated how to build a system of logic from the ground up. It’s still worth reading though there are more modern texts inclusive of contemporary systems of symbolic logic.
I suppose that media arguments nearly invariably use distribution fallacies when talking about federal debt, federal budget, the national unemployment rate and so forth. One can use time errors as well as material errors in making quantification and I suppose distribution fallacies. The worst thing is when politicians themselves are unaware of the logical error of their arguments.
No comments:
Post a Comment