Unless it falls under the "Truth Claim of the Day" label, I have typically only shared links through Facebook. However, this blog post by Jeff Weintraub deserved a bit of commentary, so I thought I'd put it here.
I have debated with various friends on more than one occasion that someone can believe something that is fundamentally wrong without it being logically incoherent. As a somewhat skilled debater, I have found that any position can be supported in a logically valid way, even if it is wrong, evil, or bearing any other type of error.
That is to say, the usual position I have to fight against is the idea that if something is wrong, it must therefore be absurd. It has to be the case that for someone to believe something that is wrong they have to have some sort of logical inconsistency driving it. Of course, this deeply misunderstands what logic is and what it does. Logic is a tool for showing how proper thinking connects assumptions or premises with conclusions or implications. If the assumptions must necessarily lead to the conclusions, then the statement or believe is what we call valid. Logic can, of course, indicate when a conclusion may or may not follow from the given assumptions; it can also indicate when a conclusion is expressly not possible given the assumptions. These cases indicate that the belief or statement is invalid. That a belief is valid, however, says nothing at all about whether it is true. If a statement is invalid, similarly, while the whole statement cannot be true, this condition says nothing at all about whether any of the assumptions or conclusions in isolation (or different combinations) are contained in statements which are true. You can't use logic to disprove assumptions.
The flip side of the position I typically combat is presented in the link, namely, that if there is no logical error or invalidity the position cannot then be wrong. This is the position taken by many academics, and from the perspective of those in the previous paragraph, they shouldn't be wrong. There may be some debate about what constitutes logical inconsistency (a silly thought, really, because validity is essentially a mathematical process), but otherwise these two views are perfectly compatible. And perfectly wrong, whether they are internally consistent or not.
In both cases, my logically minded friends seem to be unaware of the limits to logical process, despite the fact that logic itself clearly identifies certain limits to its own domain. Which, to my mind, means they're not nearly as skilled logicians as they think.
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4 comments:
I don't suppose you would include discussion of whether the premises themselves are coherent? If P1 in my argument is "This is not a sentence." or "God does not exist", can we make use of that in logical discussion? Can we draw validity from madness?
Of course that would be distinct from a premise that is feasible but simply wrong (eg "The sky is yellow").
Of course, if you cordon off the premises ad argumentum or however you like, then what you're saying makes perfect sense. It also tends to make the actual argument in question a tad superfluous.
Of course, saying "of course" at the start of every paragraph makes my prose seem rather less academic, and more... hmm. Pejorative adjective: Go.
Joel, in order for a premise to be incoherent, it has to essentially be a contradiction of some other (possibly unstated) premise. "This is not a sentence," for example, could be considered incoherent based on an unstated premise defining the term "sentence."
In order for "God does not exist" to be logically incoherent, there would have to be an unstated assumption that "God does exist," presumably as a necessary assumption for other aspects of the argument. I know some people who assert that the use of logic necessarily assumes "God does exist," but as Thomas Madsen has pointed out, a mathematical / logical system is based on definition, not assumption. There is thus no "logic only works if..."; the logic works the way it does by definition, regardless of any other facets of the universe. As such, the premises are independent of the logic itself, so some conclusion has to require the premise "God does exist," which is not so easily demonstrable.
Based on the way I used to argue, I would agree that this view makes argument superfluous. I used to see argument as a means of forcing another to acknowledge the rightness of my position; Jessie refers to this as "bashing in minds." However, if we think of the purpose of argument as actually to persuade, then argument is still useful. The key would be to draw conclusions from mutually accepted premises. This is the only way the parties could end up agreeing in the end, anyway, regardless of who "wins."
The key, I think, is that no amount of argument will force an opponent to accept our premises. As reformed people, though, we already know this to be the case, as least when it comes to the identity or existence of God. This lack of acknowledgment of the Creator is a moral failing, but I would say not a logical one.
Well, in a sense you're right, because we have formal logic that is defined in textbooks and monographs. But in terms of the sort of persuasive argumentation you seemed to be addressing, logic only works if its axioms are congruent with the universe, as least as near as we can make out. So the system is never entirely independent of its content. Sure, I could invent a system in which contradictions are okay, but no-body would listen to me.
That's the level at which the idea of a Universe without a Deity, or a rationality without a Logos, seems to me to lead to absurdity. Does that distinction make sense?
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