Why Does Conflating Reason and Logic
Lead to Confusion & Endless Useless Controversy?
A PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATION/PROPOSITION:
Contrary to much popular and academic opinion, logic is not synonymous with reason or even
the foundation of rational thinking. Logic is only a small part of reason
because most rational inferences are not, strictly speaking, logical inferences.
Let us take an illustration. You look out of the window, and observe that
you can see three houses. You turn back into the room and say “three houses are visible from the window.” The kind of sceptic that I have in mind
would say “you mean three houses were visible.” You would reply “but
they can’t have vanished in this little moment.” You might look again and
say “yes, there they are still.” The sceptic would retort: “I grant that when
you looked again they were there again, but what makes you think they had
been there in the interval?” You would only be able to say “because I see
them whenever I look.” The sceptic would say “then you ought to infer that
they are caused by your looking.” You will never succeed in getting any evidence against this view, because you can’t find out what the houses look
like [i.e. if the houses are still there] when no one is looking at them.Bertrand Russell
[A COMPLICATION: Instead of being used in the strict sense of syllogistic reasoning
(i.e. a series of deductive inferences), the word ‘logic’ is often used in a wider
sense to mean: the course of action or line of reasoning suggested or made necessary by some thing or situation. In such cases language is distorted if one tries to
substitute the word ‘reason’ for ‘logic.’ Here are some examples of the informal
use of the words ‘logic’ and ‘logically’:]
Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought
to be.
Brooks Atkinson
Conflict or competition carried to an extreme will tend to produce sameness on all sides. A single inexorable logic will finally reduce everything
to the same terms.
David Cayley
In prose each sentence follows out of its predecessor, either logically or
rhetorically.
Love is always unreasonable. There is no logic to love.
The aim of the new criticism was to penetrate the inner logic of texts rather than their meaning. The extreme example of this is what is now
called deconstructionism with its claim that texts refer to nothing outside
themselves.
George Woodcock, himself a partisan of animal welfare, called animal
rights activists “self-righteous and egotistical to an extreme.” The inner
logic of these crusaders goes like this. (1) The social change I am advocating will have beneficial results. (2) Therefore it is a righteous cause. (3)
Therefore I am a righteous person. (4) Therefore anyone who opposes me
is a bad person.
Philip Marchand
SOME LIMITATIONS OF LOGIC
Logical deductions are infallibly valid, but not infallibly true.
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. There are some premises that can’t be reached as conclusions.
C. S. Lewis
To prove that anything is true you need some truth to start with.
As nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively
known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the
use of words too plain to admit a definition.
Samuel Johnson
No argument can establish the truth of its premises, since if it tried to do so
it would be circular; and therefore no argument can establish the truth of its
conclusions.
Bryan Magee
Logical principles are known to us, and cannot be themselves proved by
experience, since all proof presupposes them.
Bertrand Russell
Simple logical relationships are, in fact, insights. It is only because they
seem so self-evident and because the contrary defies our imagination that
they are not recognized as insights.
Everything that logic can give us is ultimately founded on something
other than logic, call it faith, or common sense, or instinctive or intuitive
belief, or insight, or primary intellectual conviction.
Without faith, or something very like it, logic can’t get any traction.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
G. K. Chesterton
Logic is always an ‘if . . . then’ process which proceeds from the known to
the unknown. But if nothing is known at the beginning of the process, then
nothing can ever be known. You can’t use logic to generate knowledge from
a state of total ignorance.
As logic improves, less and less can be proved . . . Deduction has turned
out to be much less powerful than was formerly supposed.
Bertrand Russell
SOME STATEMENTS THAT SEEM TO CONFLATE REASON AND LOGIC
Every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education);
reason itself does not err.
Kurt Gödel
Logic can convince, but only emotion can motivate.
True philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic.
Jonathan Alter
John Stuart Mill
Reason is merely an instrument which, correctly employed, helps people
draw inferences from given premises without inconsistency.
A. C. Grayling
What is true conscience, that which comes from reason or that which one
feels intuitively?
Pierre Elliott Trudeau (in a letter to a girl friend)
[The following statement from a feature on the near-death experience of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander is from an Australian news and current affairs program
called Sunday Night.]
The man you are about to meet is a man of science, a brain surgeon centred in logic, which is why his story of having died and gone to heaven
is being seriously reported as proof the afterlife does exist.
In 1870 the first Vatican Council declared: ‘If anyone should say that no
miracles can be performed, . . . or that they can never be known with
certainty, or that by them the divine origin of the Christian religion cannot be rightly proved—let him be anathema.’*
* a formal curse by a pope or a council of the Church, excommunicating a person or
denouncing a doctrine
[The following argument from Cicero has a logical form. But does his conclusion
really follow logically from his premises, especially in the absence of a definition
for ‘miracle’?]
Miracles were denied even in classical antiquity. Thus, Cicero asserted
that ‘nothing happens without a cause, and nothing happens unless it
can happen. When that which can happen does in fact happen, it cannot
be considered a miracle. Hence, there are no miracles.’