When Logic is no Longer Employed

A man had a dream. It was a nightmare really. He was in the unemployment line and it seemed to run infinitely long ahead of him. He wondered how he could be so unemployable when he had all the credentials and experience for almost any job there was. He was the epitome of a highly educated man. Then, to his horror, when he looked behind him, alas, Logic was next to him – also unemployed!

There was a time when logic was required in almost any curriculum.  Philosophy was taught in every college.  Regardless of one’s major, a semester or two, at least, of logic was a requirement for graduation.  I remember the university I went to where every college major, from liberal arts to pre-med and nursing to, yes, engineering, was required to finish Philosophy 101 and 102, Logic and Ethics, respectively. I had an interesting experience because the same professor who taught Logic was the same one who taught Ethics. So, when I took Phi. 102 the following semester, during a class discussion, I reminded him that he was contradicting what he taught us in Phi. 101 with the position he was defending presently. He had a logical answer. He said, “I was teaching you Logic then but now I am teaching you Ethics”. My take on it was that Logic is the rigid structure to every monument of thought while Ethics provide the skin stone, the facial expression, and the interpretative gesture of the statue.

Sadly, we find that in today’s world, Logic is an outcast, seemingly isolated from almost any exchanges of ideas, if ever there were exchanges of any sort at all.  Surely, it is an ostracized citizen from political correctness, a victim of safe spacing and critical thinking.  In politics, Logic is an Idea non-grata. Social media is hostile environment for Logic and it will suffocate in it because the latter can suck all the oxygen from any argument.

How did this all happen?  When did it all begin to happen?  Ethics is important; more so is ethical thinking when applied to the many facets of practical life.  The problem arose in the introduction of situation ethics. I don’t know when that began but the 60’s is where I would go first.  It was then when everything was right, justified, even better, depending on the situation.  Situation ethics made everything okay.

   

Which of the following answers (below) was closer to being logical?

When asked, just about a year ago, what the single greatest existential threat to the world today, a sitting President, a Secretary of State, a former Vice President answered, “Climate Change”.

When Willie Sutton, an incorrigible bank robber was asked why he robbed banks, his reply was, “That’s where the money is”.

The journeyman bank robber, notably with much lesser level of education, often caught and prosecuted, came up with a much more logical answer, if not impeccable insight. (Note: Sutton’s answer may have been embellished by an over eager reporter, we don’t know, but it is still more logical).

The three highly educated statesmen played their best “logical” card for their base-audience, fully well aware it was not a logical answer, and each one knew that there are a number far more critically recognized threats, i.e. nuclear war, plague, famine, even over-population, future industrial accidents (Bhopal, India or Chernobyl or Fukushima come to mind) if they re-occur to a much higher scale and natural disasters that had played pivotal roles in our history. Super volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts in the past had cause dmass extinctions of entire species. Then, there are threats from the unknown, or from ones we have not even considered.

Logic, the appetite for it, has been lost in the way enthusiasm for math and science had waned among the youth, particularly here in the U.S. PEW Research has some staggering numbers.  In all categories, America's 15 year-olds lag behind dozens of other countries: No. 23 in Science, No. 23 in Reading and No. 38 in Math. Slovenia, Latvia and Malta are several rungs above for each category. As a point of reference, Singapore tops all categories while the Dominican Republic is at the bottom on two of them. From among 80 countries, the U.S. is right about equidistant between Singapore and The Dominican Republic in Math.

So, why is the U.S. still at the top in technology and industrial development? Experts argue but a good many say the U.S. still offers the most attractive environment for the top graduates from around the world who, ironically, get their post graduate education here.  We have the best schools populated in part by some of the best students from everywhere else.  The other irony is that the foreign graduates would rather stay because it is still the best place to enhance and apply their intellectual gifts. The U.S. itself is its own best asset in attracting the best, thus keeping research and development to flourish here.

But I digressed.

Logic had its roots in Geometry and mathematics. Geometry is unforgiving when it comes to finding the truth, the proof, of any argument. Geometry, however, hardly provides any wiggle room when it comes to proving a proposition because axioms – the statements of facts that are true within the context of a particular logic system – define where and how the arguments proceed.

Example 1 – Rod A that has length ‘a’ and Rod B that has length ‘b’ are axioms. They both had been measured. When connected to each other, end for end, we can say that the connected Rod AB is longer than either A or B and we can say that if ‘a’ is longer than ‘b’, then a-b is a positive number and b-a is a negative number. This is childish you say, but this is just to get you to a frame of mind and to remind you that logic has to work and will only work that way. When you next tune in to hear your network political pundits, watch out for the pitfalls created by logical fallacies or fallacious logic.

Example 2 – All mothers are women (axiom). (a) But you cannot say, “All women are mothers”; (b) although Agrippina is a woman, she is not necessarily a mother even if we saw her drop a girl at school one morning; (c) the reason we still can’t say she is a mother is from a number of circumstances that will explain why we saw her dropped off the girl in school: the girl was a neighbor’s child, the girl is her niece, etc. But here is why Logic is interesting. Even if Agrippina is not the mother of that particular child, Agrippina could still be a mother whose children we have not seen or we’re not aware of. There is nothing legalese here but to be aware that even if we know certain axioms we may not be able to make certain conclusions, conclusively, that is.

Example 3 – Many years ago when the kids were still at school, our younger son wanted to submit a project for the junior high school science fair. One early afternoon on a Sunday, he and I, armed with a 6-foot stick, a level and a tape measure went to measure the height of the local 3-storey bank building nearby. We positioned the stick upright on the concrete parking lot next to the building, using the level to make sure it was perpendicularly upright. He measured the length of the shadow cast by the stick. Then he measured the length of the shadow cast by the building which obviously was a lot easier to do than scale the side of the building, plus it was a Sunday for car traffic to be a hindrance. By simple ratio and proportion, he calculated the height of the building. Why this example? Logic, from its geometric roots, is useful to make a correlation between axioms, or determine a conclusion even when not all the axioms are available. In this case, the known axioms were the height of the stick, the length of its shadow and that of the building. Three knowns and one unknown was an easy equation to write.

I highlighted correlation above because it is a method to relate the axioms together. But let us not conclude that correlation is the same as causation. And that is where the pitfalls begin. The shadows of the stick and building were correlated but the stick did not cause the building to cast the shadow, let alone cast the length that it did. Strictly speaking the shadows were caused by the absence of light blocked by the stick and building, independently of each other; that happened to have a correlation.

This is how superstitions begin and why we still have them in the 21^st century. Don’t disagree too quickly. Players of any sport around the world are the most superstitious. Many of them have particular routines that border on obsessive behaviors before every game, others won’t wash their caps when on a winning streak, kids stroking an inanimate ceramic frog on the dugout during little league playoffs, and on and on.  They often believe that certain routines and objects that correlated with winning streaks were also agents of causation.  Or, in the case of coin tosses, the logical meaning of probability is tossed out the window (pun intended). When confronted with 13 consecutive tosses of “tails”, a person may wager heavily on “heads” for the next toss because, surely, it will be “heads” the next time. Well, don’t bet on it. The odds are always the same, 50-50, each and every time a coin is tossed. The coin does not have a memory. Consecutive coin tosses were known to go from 20-30.  In fact, if we let 1 billion people toss coins around the world today a million times each, the odds of one coming up with 30 is highly probable. But we would still be inclined to bet the opposite when faced even with just a 10-in-a-row streak. Why, because superstition far exceeds Logic.

Now, you are aware each time you read something on Facebook, or hear political pundits, that often Logic is not on duty, or worse, it is out of a job.

I leave you with this “oldie but goldie” of a logical gem:

A logician was lost in the jungle and must find his way back. He came upon a fork on the road – one road will lead him to the good village while the other to a tribe of cannibals. At the fork two natives stood who can provide information. One will always tell the truth, the other will always lie but they will only answer to a yes or no question and the logician can only ask one question to only one of them. The other bad news is that the logician does not know which native is the liar or the truth teller.

He did ask a question and got an answer. Safely, he made it to the good village based on the answer but what was his question?