Tuesday 12 May 2020

Logic

In the previous post, I made a point about logic and then, of course, immediately remembered arguments with some of those who insist that "logic" is not how we think but a constraint on our thought.

Of course someone might be intelligent in one way, e.g., in abstract reasoning, but not in another way, e.g., in personal relationships, but we simply need to specify which kind of intelligence we mean before we formulate logical propositions like "Either he is intelligent or he is not intelligent," "He is not both intelligent and not intelligent" etc.

Hegel, whom we have discussed, is also relevant because his dialectics, like the calculus, is about change, e.g., about inorganic matter in the process of becoming organic, thus of transforming into its opposite. We can recognize the process without necessarily specifying at which stage the qualitative transformation occurs.

In "Entity," Nielson does not recognize that people capable of advanced technology remain simultaneously capable of a range of unscientific attitudes and responses, a deplorable lack of insight in a psychotechnologist.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I also thought of George Orwell's use of "doublethink" in 1984, in which members of the Party are "trained" to switch to diametrically opposite and contradictory positions if the Party Line decreed that be done. But that is obviously an abuse of intelligent and logical thinking.

Ad astra! Sean