What separates humanity from other animals on the planet is the ability to think. Thinking itself has many uses, including persuasion, problem-solving, and the satisfaction of curiosity. Thought expands heady subjects and concerns grave objects, and so thought is itself of great significance, and so thought cannot be treated lightly. It is implicit that thought needs guildlines in order to be productive, or else cognition would be chaos with no end; thought needs a basis of some sort: it needs justification.

Even before the days of Plato, western civilization has placed great weight upon logic. Logic became a tool by which to evaluate the truth, and truth in turn became the adornment of what should be followed and believed. Illogical statements cannot be believed because they are not validated by rational means, and therefore they are not perceived to hold truth.

What if, however, I were to contest that one should follow not what is logical, but what appeals the most emotionally? Even emotions need not usurp the place of logic, but instead you may as the reader insert anything into the place of emotion: whim, hallucinations, anything illogical. After all, Plato gave three tools to persuasion: logos (logic), pathos (emotional appeal), and ethos (validity of rhetoric). The reason the west is preoccupied with logic is because of the powerful impact of Aristotle, who is the namesake of Aritotelian logic.

Even while Aristotle was inculcating logic in the mind of the western world, many of his contemporaries were vehemently rebuking the system of thought, writing paradox after paradox to elucidate the faults inherent in Aristotle's system. Some of the more famous ones are Zeno's paradox of the arrow (in which Zeno seems to prove that motion is impossible) and the infamous liar paradox (modified version of Epimenides's original paradox: THIS SENTENCE IS FALSE.)

Therefore, on what basis, if not logic, may thought be justified?

 

 

 

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Interesting question.
Although, if I may, I would like to answer a question with a question myself.
Can logic be justified first of all?
Most likely, if you gave me a justification, it would be through logic, thereby making a nice circular argument.
You would have to use some other form of argument, I would think through either pathos or ethos as you have stated, but we would need some guidelines to go by for - as you also earlier stated - we have experience in systems of logic, but not rhetoric or emotional appeal outside of courtrooms and mass media i.e. in closed, empirical systems replicable by academia.

I suppose the best start of a reason I can give is the results of logic - several thousand years of the use of logic by man has transformed him from a nomadic creature at the mercy of his ecosystem to a creature of specialization that defines his ecosystem. But then again you could counter that by asking if the ends justify the means. But that would be a logical argument! Yet another end to our route of reasoning.

Basically you have to justify logic illogically, or as one of my old high school teachers put it most ironically,
you must have a 'faith in logic'.

 

 

 

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The problem with justifying logic itself is that logic is a system of justification, thus one would be justifying justification. If justification must me justified, then there must be (1)no evident contradictions to a justification and (2)supporting evidence for justification. The latter continues indefinitely: logic is validated by one statement, which in turn must be proven valid by another, that statement by another, and so on. Therefore, there must be an infinite number of justifications in order to justify reason. However, one can argue that there is a limit to which something can be justified, that there is a point where evidence is so implicit that there is no need for justification. Take, for instance, oneself. The idea of self is implicit enough that it hardly needs justification, no matter how many meditations on however many philosophies DeCartes thinks is necessary. If I do not exist, then there is no point in my pondering it, much less anything else. Therefore, something as basic as self does not need didactic justification.

[more later]

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I don't think that's necessarily true. It's valid to qualify a claim in one system of justification with another as long as the two are not interdependent (or mutually exclusive, I'll have to check which one sometime) It seems you're going off a tangent of justifying justification. That would only be the case if you were doing that to every system of justification which would lie on the premise that every system of justification is completely interdependent, which is not true for we know that emotional and logical appeal are separate once we remove intuition from the equation.

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A contrario, it is perfectly acceptable to qualify one statement with one system of logic that eludes another system. The entire purpose of a system of justification is, after all, to point to a truth that should be reachable by either means. Clearly one cannot justify logic with logical arguments; such is like justifying the Bible by giving quotes from scripture. The argument is circular and the philosopher accomplishes nothing with his arguments, since nothing significant can amount from the proofs. The way to justify logic, then, would be to approach it by another exo-logical system, though not necessarily an illogical system. All methods of reasoning, logical or otherwise, have a foundation to which the thinker applies his observations, which are kneaded and reshaped by the tenets of the method, until at the other end are reassembled the results. For logic, this foundation is postulates and dogmatic rules. For emotional appeal, it is emotional response. In order to justify logic, there can be no solid rules for thought, since this resembles too closely to logic anyhow. Rather, there must be an alternative course onto the truth of the matter.

When I speak of "justifying justification," I surely mean justifying the propositions that logic itself would posit. My previous example merely serves to exemplify the problem of a logical analysis of logic. If logic cannot justify itself, then what excuse is there for logic to have a place on the human cerebral shelf? Moreover such an excuse cannot have the sound guidelines that logical system had assured reason previously, for these do not lay an exo-logical basis for reason. Thinking outside logic requires one to abscond from the realms of nearly three thousand years' western philosophy.

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Ex contrarium , didn't I say that? All I was saying is that that statement holds only when the two systems of logic are not interdependent, at least in the case of the proposition held to be invalid, otherwise a circular fallacy is committed. E.g., there's no point of using Euclidean geometry when one makes a statement in algebra disproving the Pythagorean theorem because the two maths are interdependent (analytical geometry).

The case in particular I was referencing to was that of qualifying logic in systems of justification.
Hmm, let me establish a definition here to prevent a fallacy of ambiguity. When I say illogical, I refer to the plain definition 'not of logic'. I make no reference whatsoever to a lack of reason in the connotative stance. So I believe any exo-logical system would have to be illogical. Something has to be logical or illogical. There is no quasi-logic unless you speak of some phrase which contains both; these are compiled statements, I refer to a single independent thought when I state a logical true/false state. So I don't see what you mean by an exo-logical but not illogical system.

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The word illogical lends itself to mean "contradicted by logic," even though the contruction of the word itself simply implies "not logical." Obviously you take the latter meaning of the world to mean the same thing as my exo-logical, meaning "outside logic," or dealing with justification through means irrelevant to logic. I only avoid illogical so as not to miscontrue my meaning as the former definition. Such confusion is only a matter of semantics.

As for a static logical "true/false" state, this can be easily broken. Even if a statement cannot be evaluated as either true or false, there does not need to be a special system of "quasi-logic" to understand it, since logic can also be "fuzzy logic," having many different values between true and false. Fuzzy logic differentiates between different levels of truthfulness, rather than simply having to deal in absolutes. For instance, if one had to make a decision as to if a bacterium or a ball-bearing bullet were "large," it would be truer to describe the bullet as large, although neither one would normally be considered large by themselves. This is because size is relative, and logic adapts itself for the purpose.

Fuzzy logic is important to comprehend, because it allows for very refined handling of justification. One statement can be truer than the other, although neither of them are the truth. However, fuzzy logic is superfluous to the search for alternate justification, an exo-logical (or for you, illogical) source.

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Loooooove

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with logic humans make things easier for them selves beacouse by knowing that something is logical than that something makes sense.

why else would you do something that is logical. i think that what makes us humans is not logic but the ability to do illogical things and enjoy them.
let's say someone likes skydiving. by all means that is not logical thing to do, but when you jump -- you find logic in that you did that, no matter maybe all of your friends told you not to!
that also makes us different. something that is logical to me isn't logical to someone else. but that doesn't mean we need to fight over it. we can discuss it and at the end someone might change his logic depending on arguments presented in discussion.
also logic is a powerful tool you can have at your disposal. also something powerful can always be used to do great stuff, but when you get so much used to it, you can't live without it and at the end you become the tool of that power that made you. worst thing is when you realize that you became tool of something which you relied on very much in your life like logic.
at the end you might find yourself unable to do anything that has no logic to you, and when you come to that point than you see that there is no logic. You know if you go right you are following your logic and still are the tool of your logic, and if you go left the illogical way -- all of your life living in logic just falls apart and you have to start it all over again.

ones preferring logic might find sanctuary in mathematics couse it is based on logic. Most logical thing of all things known to me is that 1+1 = 2. With that assumption people who tended to logic created a whole science called mathematics which now has enough power for you to live in it's ways your whole life and not to find the answer it is looking for when you go with Real numbers tending to +, or escaping for for Real numbers tending to -. And there is that awsome number called 0. You can't divide with it but again when you multiply with it you get the same number 0. How interesting, but is it logical?
Well you see that is why you have all of those systems in mathematics, and some of them even don't have 0, couse they realized it's kinda silly number to deal with....

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Alright, chronological postings first.


Agreed then. Wow, english is a language of ambiguities. About my true/false conditional statements:
I meant to apply them to absolute cases only
Obviously there are many relative cases of truth and fuzzy logic is an important concept, but if we were ever to follow in Plato's ideal of universals, they would have to follow a true/false absolute, which is what I was partially attempting at, whether or not universals are possible of course...

Of course, going past our ambiguity and postulate problems, I'm trying to find an answer to the original dilemma posed here. Perhaps we are limited in our search by the lack of non-logical analysis
and the fact that intuition is too much of either a self-justifying item or emotion to differentiate at times.
Therefore, I contest if the question is in fact impossible to answer given our current conditions.

Dare I say that this one word answer could be a possible manner? Justification by love? Anyone want to call appeal to emotion on a non-justifiable argument? By all means, one could theoretically justify logic by a love of logic, a strangely colloquial statement that seems to fit a formal answer.

He does have a point. There are ambiguous - and yet quite pragmatically sound - definitions of 'logic' even when we are all using the same postulates. But I suppose we are talking about justifying logic in general, not one specific case.

*tangent* Ok, I'm humored. What non-natural exclusive system of math doesn't use 0?

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