Defining logic as "the study of information encoded in the form of logical sentences" is like defining the sentence as "a group of words combined in the form of a sentence."
But Stanford Professor Genesereth's definition of logic (offered in the first segment of an online Coursera course on logic) is worse than circular. Logic is not (fundamentally) about propositions, just as carpentry is not (fundamentally) about hammers or nails. Carpentry is about how to build or repair, and then building or repairing; say, a house. Logic, too, is about method: how to think, and then thinking, perhaps by building an argument or assessing one. Logic is the science and art of reasoning in such a way that one's thought is consistently tied to reality, and therefore capable of yielding knowledge. Translating statements into logical forms (like "All S are P") and understanding the implications of such sentences are a means of doing that. It is a critical part of the method. But logic as science of method is about more than the study of propositions or other "logical sentences."
American Heritage's definition of logic is not bad: "The study of principles of reasoning, especially of the structure of propositions as distinguished from their content and of method and validity in deductive reasoning." But if we read past the comma, this definition seems to give short shrift to inductive logic. The procedure of induction is to draw inferences from premises already adopted as true--to excavate what is implicit in those premises. Induction involves forming by observation and experiment the generalizations that may then serve as premises for subsequent deductions. Once we know that there are aardvarks, and what makes aardvarks like other aardvarks and different from all the non-aardvarks, we can feel logically justified in deducing, "Here's another damn aardvark." Once we know something about the laws of gravity by inductive inference (thanks Galileo, Newton, et al.), we can deduce where the asteroid is headed.
Dictionary.com defines logic as "the science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference." "Inference" we can take to be not quite a synonym of "reasoning." They're both about how to get from starting points to conclusions (although you could say the same thing about the running of foot races). American Heritage says that to infer is to "conclude from evidence or by reasoning." To reason is "to use the faculty of reason; think logically." Dictionary.com says to reason is "to form conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises" and that to infer is "to derive by reasoning; conclude or judge from premises or evidence."
In his introduction to his logic text The Art of Thinking, David Kelley says that his book is about "how to think." Thinking is a "cognitive process we use in the attempt to gain knowledge or to understand something, as distinct from our emotional responses to things." The subject matter of logic is "the rules and strategies of thinking, certain standards that tell us when we have achieved a clear understanding of some subject or succeeded in proving a case." Kelley distinguishes thinking as a directed mental activity from the "thinking" that has to do with the flotsam and jetsam that floats through one's mind even when one is not attempting to direct thought. I'm going to go out on a limb (a fairly stout limb given the title of Kelley's book) and declare that "thinking" in the narrower sense Kelley spells out is synonymous with "reasoning." Or we can say that reasoning is a kind of thinking: the directed-toward-finding-out-things kind of thinking.
Reasoning and being logical are closely allied. But reasoning has more broadly to do with the exercise as such of the human conceptual faculty to find out about the world. Logic is the method we follow (not always formally and explicitly) to keep ourselves on track in that process. Formal logic is explicit and precise in its vocabulary and directives--perhaps precisely wrong, if and when logicians go off the rails with symbolic arcana or non-fundamental definitions. If we mean by logic only formalized and explicitly applied rules of logic, i.e., logic as a developed science, then its overlap with reasoning as such is not as great as the overlap of any even implicit inferential process that attends to the identity of things.
The principle at the root of logic is the law of identity: the fact that things are what they are. All injunctions of logic are forms of recognizing, accommodating, applying the law of identity and ensuring that it is not violated in thought as we go about identifying facts and drawing further conclusions, i.e., making further identifications on the basis of past identifications. Following the law of noncontradiction is the negative aspect of the means by which we abide by the law of identity: we're taking care to avoid the bad thing in order to continue adhering to the good thing. Whenever we see that we have stated or implied that A is non-A, we know we've made a mistake.
How many different ways can we say that A is non-A without doing so willfully? Lots of ways, some of them very subtle. Hence the need for a science of logic, for a textbook as opposed to a 3x5 card saying "remember that things are what they are." Ayn Rand stressed that identifying the nature of things must follow non-contradictory procedures when she offered a boiled-down definition of logic as "the art of non-contradictory identification." Identification of what? Not, ultimately, identification of the logical character of sentences.
Formal rules of implication help us recognize fallacies and flaws in reasoning, but also to positively assess the strength of our evidence and the level of support for our conclusions. We want "logical sentences" and their relationships to be valid. But we don't want to safeguard from contradiction only "logical sentences." The concern is broader. We also want to know about relationships within and between arguments as well as between propositions in one sequence of an argument; and most important, the relationship between our argument and reality. We want to know what constitutes supportive but inadequate evidence for a generalization. We want what we're saying about reality to be true, or as true as our means and effort make possible.
Classification and definition are among the aspects of reasoning with which logic is properly concerned. You don't convey what logic as the method of reasoning is basically about if your definition of logic--what you write on the blackboard as worth encoding--is "the study of information encoded in the form of logical sentences." Concepts of method have something to do with the purposes the method is designed to achieve. The purpose regulates the method. Logic is fundamentally about guiding our reasoning. Logic is not, fundamentally, about the study of information encoded in units of logical form (although it is also and importantly that). Logic is the study of any principles and standards designed to help ensure that our identifications identify. If we lose sight of that and merely manipulate symbols according to stipulated rules without regarding to whether these rules as practiced can help us to achieve and sustain a consistent knowledge of reality, what we are doing is not logic.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Will Provine has free will
I came across a Cornell Daily Sun article about a lecture by Will Provine on "Evolution and Intelligent Design." As I remember him, Provine liked to attack free will at every opportunity, and he did so at this 2005 event also.
Provine seems to think that volition contradicts causality. But if one of the attributes of a human level of consciousness is the ability to initiate choice, this self-regulatory capacity is a feature of our human consciousness. It is an attribute of our identity as human beings.
The law of causality is an implication of the law of identity; causality is the principle that entities act in accordance with their identity. Our ability to select freely among certain alternatives in a way that is not determined by antecedent factors--including whether to think about something we know we need to think about or to evade it (homework, a problem with a spouse that we are afraid to confront, or whatever)--does not imply a contradiction of our identity if that self-regulatory capacity is part of our identity. Nor does free will contradict our genetic inheritance (which inheritance includes the conceptual and volitional nature of our consciousness) or any environmental factors we have to grapple with. Many unchosen factors determine or constrain what we confront when we make choices, but these factors do not obliterate our ability to choose given these constraints. A freely chosen action is certainly caused. We can even say that a human action is fully determined if we include volition as one of the causal factors determining the effects of our action, a free choice made possible by the fact that we have a certain kind of consciousness. But this is not the "determinism" that determinists argue for.
Provine can't get around the fact that we are directly aware of our ability to choose. Introspection gives us that knowledge. Thus, the fact of free will, as such, is self-evident--even if there is much that is not self-evident about how our self-regulatory capacity came about biologically and evolutionarily, or exactly which aspects of consciousness we can directly control and which we cannot. We are aware of our choosing and that we could have chosen otherwise in particular cases. If we conceptualize the exercise of our free will as directly observed without trying to bend what we observe to match some antecedent notion, we arrive at a concept of free will. We recognize that we make choices not necessitated by antecedent factors considered apart from our self-regulatory capacity. The process of waking up, of gearing up to study a passage in a book, of actually acting in a certain way after having determined that such is what one should do--all these are acts of choice that we can directly observe. Whether to attend to reality or not, and, once we are attending, what alternatives to choose in the present context of our lives, are continuous questions. We choose all day long. If we introspect, we are immediately conscious of this choosing and that in any given case we could have chosen otherwise.
But Provine wants to legislate the nature of human consciousness based on his presupposition of determinism. He starts not with what he can observe about his own consciousness in action but with the assumption that men are mechanistically determined, with no true freedom of choice, and uses that to claim that that of which we are directly aware (via introspection) cannot possibly be the case. Our experience of freely choosing among real alternatives can only be an illusion, he says. But he proffers no evidence that it is an illusion except that it contradicts his a priori theoretical assertion of determinism.
This procedure is possible with respect to any observable feature of reality. I can take any untethered theoretical assertion about the nature of reality--for example "there is no matter"--and then, whenever I observe something in reality that contradicts my theory, proceed to claim that what I observe must be an illusion given the alleged truth of my unjustified theoretical claim. Whenever I see a rock, then, I can on this procedure assert that it is "amazing how my consciousness is tricking me into thinking that this material entity exists, since I know that no material entity can exist." Or I can assert that only matter exists, and no consciousness (even though only a conscious entity, obviously, could make such an assertion). Or I can assert, with Provine, that consciousness exists, and human consciousness exists, and the capacity for thought exists, and apparent freedom of choice, of which we can apparently be introspectively aware, exists, but no actual actual freedom of choice of which we are actually aware.
Why, in the case of volition in particular, must it be that that of which we are directly aware is an illusion? Because Provine has a theory about the nature of human consciousness, a theory not based on observation; his theory precedes observation; his theory trumps observation. Ergo, the freely self-regulatory feature of human consciousness can't possibly exist, even though we are directly aware of it, moment by moment all the waking day long--directly aware of this feature of our identity.
But shouldn't one draw one's theories from facts, rather than edit reality to match the theory?
Provine seems to regard free will as necessarily a religious doctrine. Although some thinkers have supposed that free will and religion are somehow comparable or necessitate each other (and therefore comparably valid or invalid), the fact of free will implies nothing religious. The facts that consciousness exists and that the human form of consciousness exists do not imply a supernatural dimension or creatures outside the natural world. Dreams, for example, do not imply the existence of ghosts; but under Provine's approach, the fact that some persons believe in ghosts because they believe that a dead parent visited them in a dream would require a rational, scientifically oriented person to deny the existence of dreams. And yet we dream...
“Choosing doesn’t imply free will,” he said. “Choices are not made freely — there are all kinds of constraints on it.” In an attempt to discredit the view that lack of free will would “lead society into a downward spiral,” Provine argued that without free will there would be no means of blaming people for their actions. “Blame is useless,” he said. “It just creates a horrible system of criminal justice.”
He added that if society recognized the absence of free will, society would ultimately be much kinder to its less fortunate.
“I hated the idea of human free will,” Provine added. He also argued that humans mostly provide their own moral guidance, and that “ultimate moral responsibility is nonexistent.” He admitted, “Free will is the hardest [preconception] … to give up.”As a student at Cornell in the early 80s, I attended one of Provine's seminars. Whether the Sun's quotations of him are strictly accurate, the ideas conveyed sound just like the Provine of thirty years ago. His rejection of free will was never well defended.
Provine seems to think that volition contradicts causality. But if one of the attributes of a human level of consciousness is the ability to initiate choice, this self-regulatory capacity is a feature of our human consciousness. It is an attribute of our identity as human beings.
The law of causality is an implication of the law of identity; causality is the principle that entities act in accordance with their identity. Our ability to select freely among certain alternatives in a way that is not determined by antecedent factors--including whether to think about something we know we need to think about or to evade it (homework, a problem with a spouse that we are afraid to confront, or whatever)--does not imply a contradiction of our identity if that self-regulatory capacity is part of our identity. Nor does free will contradict our genetic inheritance (which inheritance includes the conceptual and volitional nature of our consciousness) or any environmental factors we have to grapple with. Many unchosen factors determine or constrain what we confront when we make choices, but these factors do not obliterate our ability to choose given these constraints. A freely chosen action is certainly caused. We can even say that a human action is fully determined if we include volition as one of the causal factors determining the effects of our action, a free choice made possible by the fact that we have a certain kind of consciousness. But this is not the "determinism" that determinists argue for.
Provine can't get around the fact that we are directly aware of our ability to choose. Introspection gives us that knowledge. Thus, the fact of free will, as such, is self-evident--even if there is much that is not self-evident about how our self-regulatory capacity came about biologically and evolutionarily, or exactly which aspects of consciousness we can directly control and which we cannot. We are aware of our choosing and that we could have chosen otherwise in particular cases. If we conceptualize the exercise of our free will as directly observed without trying to bend what we observe to match some antecedent notion, we arrive at a concept of free will. We recognize that we make choices not necessitated by antecedent factors considered apart from our self-regulatory capacity. The process of waking up, of gearing up to study a passage in a book, of actually acting in a certain way after having determined that such is what one should do--all these are acts of choice that we can directly observe. Whether to attend to reality or not, and, once we are attending, what alternatives to choose in the present context of our lives, are continuous questions. We choose all day long. If we introspect, we are immediately conscious of this choosing and that in any given case we could have chosen otherwise.
But Provine wants to legislate the nature of human consciousness based on his presupposition of determinism. He starts not with what he can observe about his own consciousness in action but with the assumption that men are mechanistically determined, with no true freedom of choice, and uses that to claim that that of which we are directly aware (via introspection) cannot possibly be the case. Our experience of freely choosing among real alternatives can only be an illusion, he says. But he proffers no evidence that it is an illusion except that it contradicts his a priori theoretical assertion of determinism.
This procedure is possible with respect to any observable feature of reality. I can take any untethered theoretical assertion about the nature of reality--for example "there is no matter"--and then, whenever I observe something in reality that contradicts my theory, proceed to claim that what I observe must be an illusion given the alleged truth of my unjustified theoretical claim. Whenever I see a rock, then, I can on this procedure assert that it is "amazing how my consciousness is tricking me into thinking that this material entity exists, since I know that no material entity can exist." Or I can assert that only matter exists, and no consciousness (even though only a conscious entity, obviously, could make such an assertion). Or I can assert, with Provine, that consciousness exists, and human consciousness exists, and the capacity for thought exists, and apparent freedom of choice, of which we can apparently be introspectively aware, exists, but no actual actual freedom of choice of which we are actually aware.
Why, in the case of volition in particular, must it be that that of which we are directly aware is an illusion? Because Provine has a theory about the nature of human consciousness, a theory not based on observation; his theory precedes observation; his theory trumps observation. Ergo, the freely self-regulatory feature of human consciousness can't possibly exist, even though we are directly aware of it, moment by moment all the waking day long--directly aware of this feature of our identity.
But shouldn't one draw one's theories from facts, rather than edit reality to match the theory?
Provine seems to regard free will as necessarily a religious doctrine. Although some thinkers have supposed that free will and religion are somehow comparable or necessitate each other (and therefore comparably valid or invalid), the fact of free will implies nothing religious. The facts that consciousness exists and that the human form of consciousness exists do not imply a supernatural dimension or creatures outside the natural world. Dreams, for example, do not imply the existence of ghosts; but under Provine's approach, the fact that some persons believe in ghosts because they believe that a dead parent visited them in a dream would require a rational, scientifically oriented person to deny the existence of dreams. And yet we dream...
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