The moon is made of green cheese. Therefore, either it is raining in Ecuador now or it is not.
In our earlier discussions of logic, the failure of modern logic to take relevance into account seemed to me a great failure. Specifically, I maintain that the forms of natural language cannot be entirely separated from the content, no matter how many logicians deeply pine for such a situation.
Now, to the extent that modern logic is a branch of mathematics, I have no problem with it. It has found uses in computer programming and probably other fields, and it's an interesting intellectual exercise in itself. It is to the extent that modern logic attempts to use natural language to create or understand meaning that it fails.
Relevance / Relevant logicians have tried to develop formal expressions of relevance and have come closer to making premises and conclusions relevant to each other, but they haven't solved the problem entirely.
As for me, while I fully understand there are practical uses for modern logic, it seems that Aristotelean logic is superior for analyzing arguments in natural language. Else, it is either raining in Ecuador, or it is not, because the moon is made of green cheese.
4 comments:
The failure of "modern logic" to take relevance into account is deliberate. If you want to find out where this from, trundle on down to your local New Age bookstore, where you can find the most amazing gemisch of misunderstood quantum physics, reworked Positive Mental Attitude, and a little bit of energy medicine that actually works.
And then, there's the stuff about Angels, vibrational energies of rocks, Tarot, aromatherapy, Yoga, Buddah, faith healing.....
At its core, most of this stuff is an attempt to get at the advantages of religious faith without resorting to Christianity or Judaism. The funny thing is, Yoga sits very easily next to Catholicism as I was taught it, and all that bit about the vibrational properties of rocks translates immediately into some very useful prayers. People who wouldn't be caught dead with a Rosary can carry pocket rocks.
The "Quantum Physics" all turns into faith-based miracles. Like Jesus said, "Your faith has saved you."
As for all that bit about Chinese medicine, meridians and Chakras, the body does run on electricity and does have electrical fields, which very fortunately are not disrupted by the appliances in our homes. Why is that?
There are a few needles in that haystack. Few. It'd be a whole lot better if some of these people would stop using quantum physics as an excuse of intellectual laziness.
Valerie
I have a friend who is a logician, but I have to say in his defense that he would be justly offended by being compared to a New Ager. :)
It's interesting what problems the system has, though. He just had me read a paper of his on trying to make a particular scientific claim in a logically rigorous way. His claim is that you can't do it in first-order logic. (I showed him that I thought you could, but you had to introduce a primitive to limit the field, but he tells me that is undesirable.)
So is the problem that the idea is nonsense? In this case, no! It's a simple matter to express it in English or any other natural language. The problems wholly arise from the mathematical nature of the language.
By the way, I like your syllogism because it captures not one but two oddities of modern logic. Phrase it this way:
M → (E v ~E)
The statement is trivially true because the moon isn't actually made of green cheese. So, "If the moon is made of green cheese, then..." is going to count as true no matter what follows it.
But then you have a tautology in there as well, so the consequent can never be false. So the statement is twice trivally true. :)
The failure of "modern logic" to take relevance into account is deliberate.
Well, yes, they wanted to separate form and content, and you can't do that and keep relevance in a natural language.
I should also note the syllogism was originally Edwin Mares's, I believe. I found it in the entry on Relevance Logic, linked in the post.
Post a Comment