Why does logic work

Some members of the audience may be persuaded by this logic. However, other members of the audience may follow this logic instead:. Premise 1: The government that governs best, governs most. Premise 2: The government proposed by the speaker does very little governing. Conclusion: Therefore, the government proposed by the speaker is bad. Logic is important because it influences every decision we make in our lives.

Logical thinking allows us to learn and make decisions that will affect our lifestyle. If no one thought logically, we would all be running around like chickens with our heads cut off, and nothing would make any sense.

Why is logic so important? The answer is that logic helps us better understand good arguments—it helps us differentiate between good and bad reasons to believe something. We should want to have well-justified beliefs. We want to know what we should believe. Why are logical thinking skills important? Logical thinking skills are important because they can help you reason through important decisions, solve problems, generate creative ideas and set goals—all of which are necessary for developing your career.

Philosophy is based on reasoning, and logic is the study of what makes a sound argument, and also of the kind of mistakes we can make in reasoning. So study logic and you will become a better philosopher and a clearer thinker generally. The role of logic in society is to set the rules that we must follow to achieve rational communication. Laws of logic are the rules that we must obey so that we can have rational communication. I have already asserted the fact that nothing in the world actually behaves according to logic.

So how can we use logic in the world around us? We can try to use logic to construct arguments about the real world, but no matter how unambiguously we build the argument, if we start with concepts that are ambiguous, there will be ambiguity in the result.

However, understanding mathematical logic helps us understand ambiguity and disagreement. It helps us understand where the disagreement is coming from. It helps us understand whether it comes from different use of logic, or different building blocks. If two people are disagreeing about healthcare they might be disagreeing about whether or not everyone should have healthcare, or they might be disagreeing about the best way to provide everyone with healthcare.

Those are two quite different types of disagreement. If they are disagreeing about the latter, they could be using different criteria to evaluate the healthcare systems, for example cost to the government, cost to the individuals, coverage, or outcomes. Perhaps in one system average premiums have gone up but more people have access to insurance. Or it could be that they are using the same criteria but judging the systems differently against those same criteria: one way to evaluate cost to individuals is to look at premiums, but another way is to look at the amount they actually have to pay out of their own pockets for any treatment.

And even focusing on premiums there are different ways to evaluate those: means, medians, or looking at the cost to the poorest portion of society. If two people disagree about how to solve a problem, they might be disagreeing about what counts as a solution, or they might agree on what counts as a solution but disagree about how to reach it.

Used with permission of Basic Books. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. VIA Basic Books. By Eugenia Cheng. Close to the Lithub Daily Thank you for subscribing! Just Because You're Paranoid Danielle Evans on Mrs. November 12, by Caitlin Flynn. We live in the "meta world" and use basic mathematics to prove things about logic as an object. We escape what you call "recursion" by dividing the world into two parts : the world of semantic and the world of syntax a bit like a duality between subject and object so we don't have to deal with justifications.

That view was strongly related to how the world was seen in the 20th century see for instance "Sense and Reference" from Frege. Logic as computation. This is a recent turnover in Logic.

It seems that a lot of philosophers and even logicians doesn't know that but around the 70s, with the emergence of Computer Science, we discovered a link between Logic and Computation : actually, proofs can be seen as computer programs, formulas can be seen as types for programs, reduction of proof cut-elimination can be seen as the execution of programs and vice-versa. That link is called the "Curry-Howard isomorphism" and throws away the old view we had about Logic.

Logic can now rely on the natural phenomena called "computation". It seems that logic is something already present in the nature that we only approximated with our systems.

Some philosophers in that point of view explain Logic by a system of rules interacting with each other in a dual way no external reference, see Hegel's conception of negation. Most of the work in that field are written in french only see LIGC group.

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