Logic: What’s Missing from Public Discourse
What often passes for public discourse in contemporary society is really just a simulacrum, an imitation, of real “discourse” in the sense of a “reasoned exchange of ideas.” One realizes before long how much we are suffering from the current lack of that key ingredient within all older forms of liberal arts education: namely, logic.
Some people think of logic as the sort of things computers do—cold, calculating, and unemotional—and reject it for that reason. But computers in and of themselves aren’t “logical” at all any more than a train switching station is “logical” in and of itself. Computers (when they’re at their best) do what they’re told to do, no more, no less. Someone has to build whatever “logic” they have into them. Usually the sort of thing you can get into a computer is essentially mathematical—which is to say, if you can’t reduce the thing in question to some sort of mathematical equation, you can’t get it into the computer at all—and math, as we all know, is cold and calculating. Printed circuits are not “cold,” but they can under the right circumstances “calculate,” and they are absolutely unemotional.
Logic, on the other hand, is the glue that holds human discourse together. Logic is what keeps us “on track” in a conversation and helps us to keep checking back to make sure both of us are talking about the same thing in the same respect.
So, for example, when two people are arguing about whether something is “fair” or “unfair,” and by “fair” one person means “getting to keep what I earn” and the other person means “everyone getting the same,” these two people aren’t really arguing at all; they’re simply talking past one another. The one might as well be speaking Chinese and the other German.
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