I'm reading one of those tiny books that purports to be an introduction but gets you very far into a topic. Logic: A Very Short Introduction, by Graham Priest, (Oxford UP 2000). Priest is a professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia.
One of the things that the author asks is whether logic is universal and hard-wired. He tries to distinguish between cases that are true in every case, and cases that are conditional.
"Perhaps the most influential of modern linguists, Noam Chomsky, suggested that we can do this [make grammatical sentences] because the infinite collections are encapsulated in a finite set of rules that are hard-wired into us; that evolution has programmed us with an innate grammar. Could logic be the same? Are the rules of logic hard-wired into us in the same way" (6)?
So I tried to think of something that was always the case. If you go to a barber, and emerge with your hair cut, is it not always shorter?
Yes, but only on first glance. What if the haircut took six months, my friend Gary Mayer just popped in bringing the girls home from a movie and asks? And there were only a few tiny snips, my wife suggests out of the bathroom, while combing her hair after a shower? This absolutely certain case suddenly went back into the conditional category (conditioners optional thanks to the shampoo Gary and wife provided to wash out the tangles).
Can we think of ANY case that is ALWAYS the case?
Alas, I feel a lot less logical as I read this book.
Is there anything anyone can say that is always the case? Even something that is true by definition -- that a marriage is between a man and a woman, is now under attack.
Is it true that a dog is not a cat? There is some kind of Barbie movie out that my daughter watches every morning with a very catty dog, or a doggish cat, and there's something unique about this, it is implied, but there is also an implication that more dogs and more cats should be like this, as it's the direction of evolutionary progress.
I can't think of anything that is always the case. Perhaps all definition, by definition, is suspended on faith. And without that, the whole world of definitions starts to move, and become a radical anomian postmodern giggle blast.
The next two chapters are going to attack time and identity. I can't wait.
4 comments:
Kant talks about the categorical imperative--that what is true at one level of application can be untrue in a different context. The resulting confusion he construed to be a major--perhaps the major--problem of ethics.
Eh?
Dogs and cats and people are all mammals. I found the PBS Nature series episode about the animal trainer who adopted a baby cheetah to be deeply moving--when the trainer retrieves Toki after having lost track of him in the bush. Certain that a terrible fate has befallen him, he finally discovers him, alive and well, and the two approach each other, Toki purring affectionately as the trainer pets him behind the ears. The bond between this human and this terrifyingly efficient undomesticated feline carnivore is profoundly moving.
The logic book doesn't so far deal with Kantian intuitions but only Humean attempts to cut everything down to logical spoonfuls (imagine if the 60s band were to be called the logical instead of the Lovin Spoonful). Quite amusing notions like if a child was to age one second, would he still be a child? Yes. But if he were to age a million seconds, would he still be a child? No. So, is this now a different person?
So you start with a vague subject and then try to trip the subject with a sharp predicate, and then laugh over the absurdities that commence.
The book is quite funny because it's so rigorous, applying mathematical precision to vague things like aging and our nomenclature of childhood and adult.
I do wish some more Kantian thinking would have leaked into the booke, but so far, none. Kant does say in his own book on logic that no animal can have an idea about an idea.
Which pretty much means they can't understand transcendent concepts like rights or friendship or law as an abstract category.
And yet the left wants to apply all these concepts to them.
It's enough to make you walk around Konigsberg like a zombie, reciting Christmas songs, and playing themon a zither.
playing them on a zither.
Speaking of aging, scientists tell us that almost the total mass of the body replicates itself over time, that a person in middle age is composed of more new cells than old ones. I think that nerve cells don't replicate, but how about bone cells? Brain cells?
When you drink a beer, supposedly millions of brain cells "die". ??
So then alcoholics must have severely compromised brains.
How many millions of brain cells can we afford to lose and still be "normal"?
What's "normal"?
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