Jay asked:

I want to learn more about logic and how to apply it to my decision making in daily life. What would
you suggest that I read in order to accomplish that goal?

and Felicia asked:

How might reasoning as applied to ethical problems result in "better" conclusions than those derived
from feelings, customs, rhetoric or prejudice?

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In response to Jay: first, I don't think that reading texts on pure logic will be the best course.
Something more applied would be best, I think. Try: Science and Unreason(1982), by Radner and
Radner; How to think about weird things(1995), by T. Schick; Logic and contemporary rhetoric(1980)
by H. Kahane. There's also Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1994), Inevitable illusions: how mistakes of reason
rule our minds; and I highly recommend: Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors we live by.
Then you could just start in on Plato, and read him with an eye for contradiction and inconsistency.

In response to Felicia: I would definitely not put the term "better" in scare quotes. Take a look at some
of the above readings. What reasoning teaches is the ability to find contradictions, inconsistencies,
poorly formulated definitions and conclusions that do not follow from them. Feelings, customs,
rhetoric, and prejudice teach the opposite, and following them has lead, in my opinion, to the worst
abuses of humanity. Suppose that your feelings led you to want to exterminate Jews? Or blacks, or
Native Americans, or Muslims? Should you follow them? Suppose the customs of your country or
culture led you to the same actions? Should you follow them? Why not? But asking"why not" is the
beginning of applying reason to those questions. In asking that question, is the appropriate answer,
"because anothergroup says not"? But then why pick the second group over the first? They are both
going by their feelings, right? Do we just pick the group we happen to live with, or happen to like
best? But all these questions are the beginnings of applying reason to ethics, an absolutely
necessary activity, in my opinion (and one in which I am not alone). So, first, we learn to reason;
second, we consider ethical problems in the light of reason, inasmuch as we are able.

Steven Ravett Brown

I think Jay's question goes straight to the heart of a current debate concerning a possible new stage
in the evolution of logic. Historically, formal logic has been both an engine for intellectual liberation
and development and at other times it has held freedom of thought to ransom. This has been true of
ancient logic as well as its modern forms. There is a hot discussion, being lead to some degree in this
country by Alec Fisher concerning the Logic of Real Arguments,continuing the work begun in his joint
book with Michael Scriven, Critical Thinking.

The thrust of the argument is that that formal or mathematical logic can be taught to mathematicians
and logicians so that they obtain good degrees but many of them fail to apply the skills and
techniques they have acquired to their personal or professional lives. Secondly, many successful
people reason well and understand complex and lengthy arguments without ever having their minds
troubled by an education in logic. So what is it that exactly that knowledge of logic allows you to do?
Alec Fisher, like myself believes that logic is a powerful thinking tool, but not everyone has a mental
frame of mind that allows them to spot these particular abstract patterns among the flow of everyday
thought. If you will excuse the personal anecdote, logic was for me the 'mental wheel' as Simon
Papert calls it in his account of the learning power of the imagery he believed existed in the visual
logic, 'Logo'. Such wheels, he believed, can become 'central organising tools' around which many
aspects of intellectual knowledge can be organised and in my own case, I am convinced that my own
formal learning did not kick itself into life until I stumbled across 'Symbolic Logic' as it was then called.

What puzzled me then and intrigues me still is how much thinking in personal and professional
contexts can noteasily be understood in terms of the strict forms of modern logic, yet patterns of
thought and speech that contain logic-like structures are recognisable in such fields.

Engineers have never had a problem with finding practical ways to make physical systems behave
through the development of cunning control and switching devices as if they are systems of logic. The
objects of the real world are then made behave as if they are objects of the logical world. However he
objects of practical reasoning are not objects in the physical world but objects of thought and more
often than not cannot be made to behave as though they are objects in a logical world without
completely misrepresenting their meaning or force. Further more to assume that they can is to
presume that the engineers version of logic will be understood by all and to bad for those it leaves
cold.

So in terms of the question asked, it seems to me that how much logic, as it exists and in what form
should be learned for practical purposes depends on the practical purpose held in mind. If the
practical purpose is to obtain a formal education in science, mathematics, engineering, programming,
philosophy, politics or the law then varying degrees of an education in formal logic ranging from the
skills of abstract thought at one end of the spectrum to the skills of debate and argument at the other,
with real world modeling in between, seem to me fit the bill. If on the other hand the practical purpose
of learning logic is to provide a tool with which to analyse the objects of thought and experience that
have at least as much emotional or value content as propositional or factual content then it is less
easy to give a definitive answer.

One approach that might be taken to get around the chicken and get a glimpse of the egg would be to
read some of the texts being produce for adults who are teaching children how to learn to think.
Robert Fisher's books in this area are a particularly fruitful source inviting ideas for the novice child
and adult alike. I would further suggest to the novitiate logician that they undertake to prepare to
teach in practice or in imagination a topic or skill of their choice because in preparing to teach
something you are forced to think 'about' the subject and in so doing you elicit for yourself the rules,
rules of thumb, strategies and permissible or prohibited lines of thought and meanings associated
with the field of thought, skill or activity.

Preparing to teach always involves asking questions like, What does the learner need to know? Why
should I tell them this and not that? We could in fact consider such questions as an informal version
of some of the structures of formal logic and in this respect the novice already knows quite a bit of
logic.

Neil Buckland