|
Can Logic Be Taught on Campus? by Steven YatesAn acquaintance of mine who had been looking over some of my recent articles about the collapse of higher education (especially philosophy) wondered whether I might be biting the hand that could feed me someday. "After all," he emailed, "you might want to return to teaching logic at a university." He was implying that we "right wingers" are making ourselves unemployable in what Fred calls "our academic theme parks" by taking the stands we take on multiculturalism, diversity-as-an-end-in-itself, the fundamental silliness of "queer studies." Sure, I recall replying, I've thought about it. I would love to return to logic teaching. I taught the subject for a total of well over five years at three different universities, and sometimes continued to hone my course in classical Aristotelian logic even after my excommunication from our churches of diversity. Here is the question that haunts, however: does the subject even fit on campus today? Is it possible for a professor to teach logic, be in earnest with the subject and with his students, and have any hope of keeping his job? Let's take a closer look. A good formal definition of logic is: the branch of philosophy concerned with the study and evaluation of arguments. (One may consult any number of textbooks on the subject. They all present some variation on this basic definition.) Note this use of argument first. As the logician uses the term, it does not mean a disagreement (much less what happens on campuses today when radical activists encounter an idea they disagree with). It refers to a set of statements. At least one of these statements is called the argument's premise(s). A premise is an argument's starting point. The premises of an argument are offered as evidence in support of its conclusion – the statement the argument is intended to establish. Good, sound reasoning occurs when a person infers a conclusion from true, meaningful premises, and when we evaluate the inference or act of reasoning we see that it hangs together properly. There are a number of implications here – all of them at odds with the major campus tendencies of the past 12-odd years. First is the idea that words indeed do have reasonably precise meanings and that there are definite cognitive rights and wrongs. Some statements are true; others are false, period. Second is the implication that arguments and evidence matter – it is not sufficient simply to assert what one wants to be true or feels is true. While we may disagree over cases, or over whether evidence really supports a conclusion, logic is not about feelings; it is about evaluating instances of reasoning and uses of language. Third, focus on the evaluative component. Logic doesn't concern itself with how people actually do think, even when they know not to rely on feelings. It lays out rules to determine whether or not their thinking is correct. Not just any premises will support any conclusion. One of the most important components of a college or university course in logic involves identifying the rules determining whether an argument or inference is valid – that is, whether its premise(s) indeed establish its conclusion. These rules are given names used as justification for judging someone's argument. In teaching logic, after setting out a number of basic definitions (argument itself, premise, conclusion, deduction, inference, valid, and so on) and explaining what they refer to, I turned to the Square of Opposition, which stands at the foundation of classical deductive logic. I began with Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction. Aristotle had a typically Aristotelian way of expressing it: [T]he same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; … For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be,… and if it is impossible that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject … and if an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, obviously it impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have contrary opinions at the same time…. (Metaphysics, Book Delta, Chapter 3, Richard McKeon edition.) In plain English: all contradictory statements and beliefs are false. This is common horse sense – is it not? There can't both be and not be houses on Elm Street. Either there are or there aren't. Why belabor this? Because many "postmodernist" academic thinkers (I use this last term loosely) write as if they believe otherwise. They say the above statement is a product of Western "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism." Maybe it's just my botched education or an aftereffect of my excommunication, but after meditating on the issue a while I've no idea what such claims really mean. Are they saying that there can both be and not be houses on Elm Street in some multiculturalist or de-Westernized environment that's dispensed with "logocentrism" or "Eurocentrism"? It isn't clear to me what would happen if a student, imbibed on too much Aristotle, were to ask a multiculturalist philosophy professor such a question. One suspects the student wouldn't ask, if he valued his grade. In any event, another device I frequently used I called the semantic triangle (semantics being a branch of philosophical logic concerned with the relationship between language and the world). More a device for classification and organization than evaluation of arguments, it distinguished between terms and sentences (linguistic entities generally), ideas or categories or propositions or theories (conceptual entities generally) and objects and classes of objects by type (material entities or classes of such entities generally). Words and sentences are not the same things as concepts; concepts are not the same things as objects. Words refer to objects, but are not themselves objects. Moreover, sentences and propositions are not the same thing: it is raining and il pleut are quite different sentences but express the same proposition. A theory (a set of propositions) is not simply a set of sentences on paper – if I write out a set of sentences expressing Newton's theory of universal gravitation and then burn it, I have not thereby burned up and destroyed Newton's theory. And there is a difference between a theory and what a theory is about (some subject matter in the world). Neither ideas nor the world somehow reduce to language, no matter what the followers of Derrida say. By charting and studying the relationships this device set up, students were able to begin to come to grips with how words and ideas are organized, and how they relate to the world, including subject matters of other courses ranging from foreign languages to science and technology. The difference between good, informative genus-and-difference definitions (my initial definition of logic exemplifies this method of defining) and merely pointing and saying, "That's what one of those things looks like," fell into place. Students who had been enrolled in one of my logic classes sometimes came to me a semester later and told me how useful the course had been, however esoteric it seemed at the time. (It might be useful to note that some of these students were majoring in subjects like chemical engineering and were quite bright; had the course not been useful to them, one can rest assured I would have heard about it!) Another useful topic for a logic course is basic statistical literacy. Statistical arguments are one of a class of arguments that establish their conclusion not absolutely but only to some degree of probability-inductive arguments, we logic-teacher types call them, contrasted with deductive arguments. Other inductive argument forms include enumerations, analogies, inferences to the next case and many scientific generalizations. A nice little book I used once or twice was Darrell Huff's absorbing How To Lie With Statistics. It enumerated the things that can go wrong in a statistical argument. Your sample size can be too small. Can we generalize, for example, from a statement about a few people living in my apartment complex in Auburn, Alabama, to a conclusion about the population of small-town America as a whole? Or one's sample can be selective: would we really want to rely on a statistical generalization about political beliefs in America generally based on a sample of university professors? I sure hope not! Or a sample can simply omit data that doesn't fit the generalization desired, as do those which simply ignore what I call "reverse hate crimes" when they assume that racism is a phenomenon limited to whites (the "dominant group," after all). One can use misleading charts or graphs, or draw a relationship between two sets of events and argue that because the one precedes the other it causes the other (a mistake sometimes known as post hoc ergo promter hoc – after this therefore because of this). For example, even if some climatologists claim that summers are getting hotter it would not follow without a lot of additional evidence that human activity is responsible – the "global warming" argument in a nutshell. This example commits one of our earlier blunders as well – by simply ignoring scientists who question the premise that the earth is really heating up. Reliable temperature records only go back so far, and tree rings may tell a completely different story. One of the dirty little secrets of statistics is that it is often very hard to get a good sample, both large enough and sufficiently free of biases of one sort or another. Finally, a topic typically covered in a standard, university-level logic course (at least when I was teaching it) is the fallacy – a generic term for any mistake in reasoning or disputation. We just considered some statistical fallacies, but there are many others. We give informal fallacies names to make them easier to spot. Some are quite common. The ad hominem argument does not evaluate a person's argument but attacks the person who made it. Think of every time someone responds to a criticism of affirmative action with, "You must be a closet racist bigot," or the equivalent. Namecalling is a typical ad hominem tactic. Ad hominem has several more subtle varieties. "Look at his association with LewRockwell.com – isn't that the site that publishes all those right-wingers who hate the government?" Or, "Doesn't David Duke, the ex-Klansman, say something like that?" You get the idea. No such rejoinder engages what was concluded, or how it was argued. In one way or another, it attacks the speaker – sometimes by attacking his associations (a ploy called guilt by association) or describing his circumstances so as to insinuate that he cannot be objective ("the Mises Institute is currently payin' your salary, white boy; naturally you're gonna say that"). Other common informal fallacies include circular reasoning or begging the question, in which the argument's conclusion is smuggled into the premises; Christians, for example, should not rely exclusively on the Bible to argue for the divine inspiration of the Bible. Not if they can draw on history, archeology, transformed lives or other sources of evidence. A red herring diverts attention from the main issue onto a side issue; defenders of Bill Clinton committed a red herring when they accused Republicans of being obsessed with sex when the real issue was Clinton's having lied under oath to a grand jury and having obstructed justice. Misuse of authority appeals to an authority in order to stop a discussion or to the wrong sort of authority, or to a supposed authority who is obviously biased, as when one appeals to the authority of the Southern Poverty Law Center for a judgment on the prevalence of "racism" in the South. (Of course, other arguments making use of authority in one way or another are entirely rational if the authority is knowledgeable and one has no reason to question his or their motives. No one has the time or inclination to become an expert on everything, and in our cognitive division of labor in society we often have to rely on the expertise of others. Recognizing that some appeals to authority are not fallacious acknowledges this.) More fallacies: an argument from ignorance treats lack of proof as positive evidence ("Space aliens might be real, because no one has ever proven they aren't."). An appeal to pity or emotion plays on feelings and uses them as evidence ("gee, Officer, if I have to pay this ticket I won't be able to take my child to the doctor tomorrow," or "our ancestors were slaves; look how behind we are economically. Poor us – we are entitled to reparations"). A strawman attacks not an actual argument anyone makes or stance anyone holds but a grotesquely oversimplified version of it. Consider the person who asks libertarians, "Aren't you guys really just Republicans who want to smoke dope legally?" An equivocation uses a term in such a way that it could have more than one meaning; words like nondiscrimination are particularly vulnerable to equivocal usages – in any given usage does it mean raceblindness or in practice is discrimination against white males (especially non-leftist white males) encompassed by its meaning? Finally, there is the horselaugh – named for H.L. Mencken, who (unfortunately) once asserted that "One good horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms." ("Darwinian evolution possibly false? Oh, c'mon, you can't be serious! Hahahahahaha!") This is just a generous sampling; there are many more. Entire books have been written about fallacies. One wonders how many of them are opened today, or if they are just gathering dust on college and university library shelves. Once we take all this seriously, we have to throw out a lot of what passes for scholarship today – and very possibly, a lot of teaching as well, to the extent that it has come to express the teacher's feelings or attempt to elicit feelings from students instead of address facts of reality. Moreover, if a student begins a sentence with, "Well, I just feel that" – a professor who is thinking logically has no choice but to respond, "This course is not about your feelings." I once received an anger-filled letter-bomb from an undergraduate at a university in another state who had encountered an article I wrote criticizing affirmative action. I quickly lost count of the number of references to her feelings and how my article had affronted her. In replying, I drew attention to the many references she had made to her feelings and finally had to ask, "Don't you ever think?" Come to think of it, where is it written, and how could anyone logically defend the idea that anyone is entitled to live in an offense-free world? Where logic is taken seriously, correct thinking is what counts – not feelings. On this point, Ayn Rand and her followers got it right: emotions are not tools of cognition. Now consider one of the dominant doctrines on campus today: multiculturalism. How does it hold up, logically? One of the basic ideas behind multiculturalism is that every culture, racial grouping, etc., has its own experience and defines its own truth or reality. One question a logical mind may want to raise is, In this case, what is the status of the multiculturalist thesis itself? Do we get different "multicultural truths" for black multiculturalists, Hispanic multiculturalists, Asian multiculturalists, queer-studies multiculturalists, and so on? Is "academic culture" itself a valid culture of sorts? If so, the culture of academic multiculturalists can define "multicultural truth." But in that case, what they define wouldn't necessarily hold for those of us subsisting in "nonacademic culture" (also known as the real world). Perhaps the multiculturalist thesis is that "all cultures are equal, or morally equivalent." In this case, the culture of non-multiculturalists is morally equal to that of multiculturalists, and there is no reason for preferring the latter to the former. In any case, multiculturalism is destroyed by its own internal logic. Of course, maybe this doesn't reflect the actual consequences of multiculturalism. Most multiculturalists are such unclear reasoners that it is difficult to tell what their statements imply or don't imply. Again, many see logic – and therefore critiques of this sort – as a Western bias. Or to put the matter another way, refusing to allow contradictory claims and arguments in our worldview is a sign of Western bias. In that case, they are open to the charge of having asserted that cultures both do and do not define their own truth, are both equal and unequal, and maybe that there both are and are no houses on Elm Street. All of which really helps make sense of multiculturalism. Of course, some will wonder: why these logical contortions? Why not just ask: where, anywhere in the world, has a multicultural society actually worked? Shouldn't the burden of argument be on the multiculturalist? Agreed. It should be, and in academies where rationality was the norm and not the exception, it would be. The point is we can show that given any clear formulation, the idea unravels. Educated people should understand that multiculturalism is just the current species of intellectual relativism, and that whatever predicaments intellectual relativism is in will be transferred to multiculturalism. A rational mind shouldn't be tempted by relativism in any guise. Any stance that relativizes truth to some framework (theory, worldview, paradigm, culture, race, gender, sexual preference or preference for decaf) invalidates itself from within, by robbing the stance of any cognitive claim on anyone outside the framework's adherents. Socrates wielded an argument of this kind against the relativism of the great sophist Protagoras with great skill in one of the most important of Plato's dialogues, the Thaeatetus. A few decades ago, serious scholars understood it. Relativism existed, but was an off-campus coffeehouse curiosity and not a serious academic stance. Today, you can present such arguments to tenured professors and receive blank stares of noncomprehension. I know, because it has happened. The above, of course, is only a sketch of a broad and once respected subject, and we've only scratched the surface regarding its applicability to the current crisis in higher education. But hopefully we've gotten the point across: the study of logic requires clarity, an exactness of definition and a precision of thought. It implies better versus worse in human reasoning, and that what counts in reasoning is evidence, not emotion. Carried out properly, a course in logic can greatly improve a college student's ability to think independently, as an individual and not simply a herd-member, and not be taken to the cleaners by every fashion to come along. It can be used to show that many beliefs currently held dear on campuses simply don't make any sense when held up to the light of close, logical scrutiny. It is thus a highly politically incorrect subject. It probably belongs in the core of any good college or university curriculum, but definitely doesn't fit into an arena where emotions reign, where intimidation is the preferred method of enforcing conformity, or where "truth" and "right" are determined by the collective will (or sexual fetishes) of agitators-in-training – which is why the pronouncements of the latter offer such a gold mine of examples of horrid reasoning. So we're back to my original question: can someone both teach logic at the university level today, rigorously, in earnest, using relevant examples, and expect to avoid eventually being run out on a rail? If any private colleges exist where this is not the case – where logical reasoning can be boldly taught and its consequences fearlessly explored – their top administrators are free to contact me by clicking on the appropriate links. I will be more than happy to help you shine some light on the present darkness of the multiculturalists or pedophilia-sympathizers, at least on your campus, for reasonable remuneration. But then again, I could be content to write more columns like this one. There would be no money in it, of course, just the satisfaction of not having had to censor myself. Academic positions aren't everything. After all, the public's opinion of universities is in decline. It is common knowledge that Marxism, for example, is dead everywhere except on American campuses. Harvard people are often jeered rather than cheered, at least outside the illustrious Northeast – and it may grow worse as more people learn that students can major in "queer studies" at what was once the greatest university in the country. Serious students put up with four years of this nonsense (sometimes more) out of the hope that a degree from a good college or university is a ticket to employment and career advancement. At one time, that was doubtless true. Today, however, things have changed, and all that remains is the realization, on the part of both employers and their future employees, is that the majority of jobs today don't require a college degree. One can learn how to write web pages, for example, from short courses readily available on the Web, and become reasonably good at it simply from practicing day after day. Most of us would be far better off learning by the apprenticeship method. Once such realizations hit home (especially with tuition-paying parents), the number of students going to universities to have their minds numbed by multiculturalists and queer-studies advocates will take a nose dive. I will welcome them to the intellectual freedom, not to mention logical thought, available over the Internet. April 9, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
