Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Pet peeve: abusing the term "logic"

I love formal logic; it's one of the most beautiful things that exist. Thus, I get annoyed when the term is abused, which happens all the time. For one thing, logic is often confused with something else, such as intuition or common sense. For example, many times people will say "That's so illogical!" when they really mean "That's so counterintuitive" or "That's so unexpected." The actual formal logic is very often counterintuitive. Which should not be surprising at all: the very reason it was developed in the first place was because some thinkers noticed that relying on intuition alone leads to errors in reasoning, so they decided a formal machinery was needed to aid the brain in the reasoning process. For another thing, people tend to forget that logic is all form, no substance. Logic analyzes modes of reasoning based on their form alone, abstracting meaning away completely. How many times have you heard something like "If you only used some logic, you'd know that cutting taxes must decrease government revenue" or similar? The truth is, logic has absolutely nothing to do with it. This statement is true because of its substance, not because of its form. Logic can't tell us anything about tax cuts and deficits. Economic theory and/or empirical observation might--but not logic.

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