Boswell's Response to the Group

Since a lot of the posts were similar, I wanted to respond to everyone in a single posting.

The one thing that I was surprised to see missing in your posts was the idea that most people don't even know what logic IS. They merely know how to sound logical. How well did you understand it until I drilled Aristotle's logical approach to discussing categories into you? Isn't much of the problems we have with people making logical arguments is due to the fact that their arguments aren't very logical? How many people could explain why one of these was logical and one of these was not?

All A is B.
All B is C.
Therefore, all A is C.

All A is B.
All B is C.
Therefore, all C is A.

If we all understood that there are RULES for the way we INFER things, wouldn't we be "right" more often in our arguments?

Many of you did bring up the idea that logic is more concerned with validity than truth, but are these things so distinct? If truth is something we discover, then we're not going to know we've found it if we're not methodical about it, right?

I was intrigued by the idea that logic is missing a spiritual element. I think there is something to that. Our capacity to understand life is limited in that humans are neither perfectly logical nor perfectly emotional. We rarely have all the facts; our perceptions are skewed by experience and by our natural tendency to stereotype and self-affirm. Our objectivity is often clouded, and we are thus apt to use premises that only seem certain to draw conclusions that only seem certain. Science tries very hard to be objective and has many controls in place to make this happen, but the bottom line is there is an infinite number of hypothesis out there. Until each an everyone is tested, science can't be certain about anything.

Having said that, I'd be cautious about dismissing knowledge as a grey area where nothing is certain. For starters, that statement doesn't hold water: if nothing is certain, even the statement that nothing is certain is uncertain. It doesn't get us anywhere. What's important to understand is that certainty is elusive (and we should remember that when we try to convince people that we're right).

Finally, a few of you said Euclid was "wrong" somehow. That needs some rethinking. His assumption about the 5th postulate being true has never been proven wrong any more than it has been proven right. No one has come up with a way to prove it, that's all. Lobechevski was trying to prove it by showing it's opposite would create contradictions. As it turned out, it didn't create any. So now we have two ideas about parallel lines that are both possibly true. Which takes us back to the idea that certainty is elusive.