The Role of Logic

I'm reading Logic Deductive and Inductive , by Carveth Read, and I came across a passage I wanted to share.

The use of Logic is often disputed: those who have not studied it, often feel confident of their ability to do without it; those who have studied it, are sometimes disgusted wtih what they consider to be its superficial analysis of the grounds of evidence, or needless technicality in the discussion of details.

I've found this true more often than not, unfortunately, and I'm curious as to why people so easily and readily dismiss logic as something extraneous or unnecessary.

Opinions?

Couple of things I can think of off the top of my very tired head. (looking back, it's just an expansion of the quotation, but it's still interesting).

Maybe people just want to be God? If we "problem solve" and "scientific method" everything, then we are becoming vulnerable and asking questions. I think a lot of people just wish they knew the answers to life, the universe, and everything... So, they pretend they do. Logic is a "get your hands dirty" way of thinking. It requires a lack of laziness... But, as we both know, people love to be lazy know-it-alls.

The other thing I can think of is that logic is simplifying. It is kind of a filter for b.s., amirite? Oftentimes, the truth is boring. I bet people want complexity over elegance. It makes them feel more comfortable. lol.

I've found this true more often than not, unfortunately, and I'm curious as to why people so easily and readily dismiss logic as something extraneous or unnecessary.

What percent of the population do you think believe this?

There are people that want to believe what they want to believe. Just as there are people that find security and confidence in logic. Weither it's emotional or ignorance that's what makes the world go round. To each their own.

I used to find the vast majority of people relatively illogical but this opinion changed for me when I started to study Myer Briggs personality types.

I'm an Analyst personality so I deal in cold hard unemotional facts and draw conclusion from them. This is why the vast majority of other personality types seem to be illogical to me. It was this bias that turned out to be my biggest obstacle when trying to understand other people's logic.

Myer Briggs is all about preferences. No preference is greater than another so no personality type is greater than another. People that seemed illogical to me simply had different preferences for information gathering and decision making. What was obvious to one was not obvious to the other given the same information.

After learning the strengths of the different preferences and personalities I discovered that my own logic was flawed far more than I imagined and what seems like utterly illogical thought was far more logical than I could have ever believed. It became truly humbling to see personalities constantly make the right logical choices without any conscious analysis or logical process that they could recount.

Do I still find some people illogical? Yes I do but in general people are far more logical and predicable than I ever imagined.

SeventhSL wrote: I used to find the vast majority of people relatively illogical but this opinion changed for me when I started to study Myer Briggs personality types.

I'm an Analyst personality so I deal in cold hard unemotional facts and draw conclusion from them. This is why the vast majority of other personality types seem to be illogical to me. It was this bias that turned out to be my biggest obstacle when trying to understand other people's logic.

Myer Briggs is all about preferences. No preference is greater than another so no personality type is greater than another. People that seemed illogical to me simply had different preferences for information gathering and decision making. What was obvious to one was not obvious to the other given the same information.

After learning the strengths of the different preferences and personalities I discovered that my own logic was flawed far more than I imagined and what seems like utterly illogical thought was far more logical than I could have ever believed. It became truly humbling to see personalities constantly make the right logical choices without any conscious analysis or logical process that they could recount.

Do I still find some people illogical? Yes I do but in general people are far more logical and predicable than I ever imagined.

This thread isn't about logic as a preferential thought process or subjective idea. It's about Logic, the study and science of valid reasoning. Logic, the study, the science of what makes reasoning valid or invalid, transcends personality types and can be taught to anyone who is neurotypical in regards to having functioning reasoning capacity.

I'm mindful of it.... its one of my workareas and contemplations in Jediism. I like to think math is the syntax (?) of thought, and so logic is integral and perhaps useful due to some nature of referential integrity (!).

I think that, like all things, when it's taken to the extreme, it stops being useful. I've noticed that a lot of logic heavy discussions turn into a parsing of words and the actual topic gets drowned by over analyzing and posturing. I think that it's often out of insecurity that people dismiss logic. Maybe they aren't educated enough to follow the logic of the other person so they just dismiss it (this happens a lot in political debates where facts are considered wrong because someone just doesn't understand the evidence), or they dismiss it because the logic proves them wrong and they are insecure about being wrong.

On a related note, not all who study logic apply it. There's a guy I work with who reads books about logic all the time. He's sitting across from me right now and a book called How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic is sitting on his desk. I'd consider him well read on the subject, yet he spends his time at work reading the Minecraft wiki and talking about how he films himself playing Minecraft at home and just got 1,000 views on his YouTube channel last night and stuff like that. He gets in trouble a lot for not doing his work and then deabtes people about it using all these terms he learned from a book that I don't really think he actually understands. He could define them, but I doubt he'll ever be able to apply them in real life. I think it's harder for people to dismiss logic if the person speaking it is also applying it.

Personally, I love logic. I'm one of those guys that wants to see the evidence all the time. But when logic turns into parsing words and syntactic debates, I get turned off to the whole discussion.

My apologies. I read your original post as "ha I'm reading a highly logical book. Here is a quote saying that some people reject logical thinking, which I find a lot do, and I'm curios as to your opinion why.".

If this thread is about some kind of thinking tool for people that transcends people then I'll leave it to the Sheldon Coopers of the world to ponder.

steamboat28 wrote: Opinions?

steamboat28 wrote:
This thread isn't about.....

:silly: :silly: :silly:

SeventhSL wrote: My apologies....

Sev, don't apologize. Thank you for the thoughtful post...

Thanks Arkayik. I'm just apologetic because I was not able to supply the kind of input sought. No big deal. I'm pleased you found some value in it though.

Rereading my post I certainly could have done a better job communicating the connections but it honestly doesn't matter.