Logic in Schools

Keith Ramsay wrote:
> George Dance wrote:
> |Keith Ramsay wrote:
> |> As far as I can tell, the two of you are just phenomenally
> |> biased against Torkel Franzen:
> |>
> |> I've been reading him since he
> |> started posting to usenet. I've often seen people who thought
> |> that they had some very strong argument, but in fact had only
> |> a very weak argument, get really annoyed when he refused to
> |> treat it with the high respect they felt it deserved. I haven't
> |> seen any cases where someone actually had a compelling argument
> |> that he was just impervious to.
> |
> |IME, he usually doesn't address any arguments (of mine or anyone
> |else's) - merely snips them and repeats points that have already been
> |addressed - hence my 'impervious to reasoning' comment. This thread
> |alone provides examples where he's done just that repeatedly - in
> fact,
> |that's all he's done in every single post.
> |
> |Perhaps we've reading different posts of his, on different lists and
> |different topics.
>
> No, it just seems pretty clear to me that you just rate
> your own arguments far more compelling than they are, and
> partly as a result rate his response far poorer than it
> is. On rereading the thread, it strikes me that you spent
> relatively little space to supporting your own position.

As you undoubtedly know from rereading the thread, my 'own position'
was snipped down to a sentence fragment ("It would be a good thing for
people in general to know logic,"), and my arguments for it edited out
completely, in
Torkel's first response. Which explains the relatively little space
devoted to those arguments since.

Since then the focus has been on his denial of that, and his putative
supporting evidence.

> You gave a little testimonial on the benefits of studying
> formal logic, but I found it a bit implausible:
>
> #whenever I've demonstrated that you or anyone else was
> #alleging something absurd, I've had to rely on formal logic myself to
> #do that.

I assume you're aware that absurdity can be demonstrated formally using
indirect proof or reductio ad absurdum. So the idea that you're
finding a bit implausible must be that I'd consider an RAA proof
necessary to actually demonstrating an absurdity.

Perhaps it's just an example of what Torkel calls my "complete
ignorance of the subject" of formal logic, but I'm aware of no other
way to prove that something is absurd than by writing an RAA proof.
Perhaps you can enlighten me on the subject, as it's relevant to the
debate: if it's possible to demonstrate that some assertion or other
is absurd without using formal logic (say, by writing, "I found it a
bit absurd" and leaving it at that), that eliminates one reason for
learning about the subject.

> You also have been inventing stupid arguments and pretending
> that they are his:
>
> #First, you've been arguing that "logic students" make these mistakes,
> #because those who aren't logic students "never" make such mistakes
> #(confusing A->B and B->A yourself).
>
> The idea that he tries to deduce the one half of the claim
> from the other is a strawman. But you assert this this kind
> of junk needs to be taken seriously by him.
>
> One of you suggested that I was taking Torkel Franzen's word
> for his claim that studying formal logic sometimes causes
> people to make mistakes that they wouldn't normally make. But
> usenet has provided a lot of the examples of this, and I've
> seen them too.

No, what 'usenet' has provided is a lot of examples that (A) people
make mistakes in formal logic. And it can be stipulated that, (B) if
those people were completely ignorant of formal logic, they would not
have made those particular mistakes.

What's in dispute is Torkel's and your conclusion that (C) studying
logic is the cause of these mistakes - that their sole cause is what
Torkel calls "the power of formal logic to confuse and bewilder" some
people (who therefore would be better off ignorant of it).

What's at issue is how you both infer (C) from (A & B). Since you've
dismissed my suggestion, that you're confusing necessary and sufficient
conditions, as 'junk', perhaps you can spell out (formally or
informally) the reasoning you are both relying on in this case.

Frankly, I don't. First, many such mistakes are mere typos (which are
not evidence that anyone has been bewitched, bebothered, nor
bewildered). Second, many of the non-typos are made by students who do
not know the point in question - and many if not all of the rest stem
from studentscaused by ignorance of a point of formal logic, not from
knowing it (and thus are no evidence against it being beneficial for
even those making them to that it would not be a good thing for even
those people to know the subject).

Perhaps that's too formal, so let me try to get down to specifics.
Let's take a specific proposal from my 'own position' - that public
school students "learn the truth table, around the same time they were
learning the times table." You could make the same rebuttal: that
some people lack the aptitude to learn the truth table, and that
learning it as children would therefore only confuse them and lead to
their making "absurd assertions". As evidence of that, you could point
to a lot of examples on usenet where people have incorrectly written a
truth table (including yours from a month or so ago).

Would those examples be evidence that these people who have no aptitude
for learning the truth table (and therefore are only confused and
bewildered by being taught it)? Is your case, for instance, evidence
that you have no aptitude for learning the truth table, and therefore
have been caused to become confused and bewildered by your study of it?


I don't think so, nor (do I suspect) do you.

> The point is not, as you want to make him out to be saying,
> that only an elite should study formal logic.

I'm afraid it is. Denying that "everyone should know formal logic", as
you two are doing, is equivalent to asserting that "some people should
not know formal logic"; which implies either that "no one should know
formal logic" or "Some people should know formal logic, and some should
not". The first is an absurdity, while the second implies elitism.

Torkel clearly implies that there are some people who lack the aptitude
for formal logic, and therefore will only be confused etc. by it. He
hasn't specified what kind of people those are, but it's clear that
they're my kind (as I'm allegedly a prime example) and that they exist
as some type of suborder of humanity (for the same reason).

> The point is
> that the benefits of doing it are more equivocal than you're
> making them out to be.

??? I suppose my best option at this point is to unsnip the list of
benefits I actually claimed:

"It would be a good thing for people in general to know logic, even if
those in power never learned it; they would be far more able to
understand what those in power were saying and doing - and, in the
extreme case, could make a difference in whom they allowed to hold
power in the first place.

And ask you which part of that you find to be equivocal.

.

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