Logic For Everyone

Josh Landy
Why are people so inconsistent?

Ray Briggs
Shouldn’t you have reasons for your opinions?

Josh Landy
Can logic ever lead us astray?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Right now I’m in Auckland, New Zealand. But our conversations begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about logic for everyone.

Josh Landy
I think logic really should be for everyone. It’s such a useful thing. Haven’t you ever tried to persuade your roommate to do the dishes?

Ray Briggs
Oh, I mean, sure. But logic is pretty useless there. People generally use guilt and shame—or threats.

Josh Landy
Threats? I don’t know what it’s like in your household Ray. But around here, we tried to reason with each other. I did the dishes yesterday. And it’s unfair for me to do the dishes two days in a row. So it’s your turn today. That’s fair, and logical.

Ray Briggs
Who are you living with Mr. Spock? I mean, it’s great when people can be reasoned with. But that’s not what happens most of the time. Usually, their problem isn’t that they don’t understand it’s that they don’t want to do what you’re asking. So logic is useless.

Josh Landy
Well, logic can’t do everything for you. I mean, you have to agree on your basic premises, like taking turns is good. Yeah. Okay. But once you have that in place, you can reason together, and that helps you find a solution everyone’s happy with without anyone getting threatened.

Ray Briggs
Fine, maybe that works for chores. But what about big social issues like climate change? We can’t make the progress we need. And it’s because some people don’t even believe it’s happening.

Josh Landy
Well, those people have been fooled by propaganda, right? I mean, if they had better logic skills they’d probably have seen through that propaganda years ago. So it’s not their fault. But it’s also not logics fault.

Ray Briggs
But Josh, here’s the thing. The people creating propaganda, they’re really good at logic. They’re just cynically, throwing out spurious premises and dodgy arguments to push dangerous conclusions. You’re assuming that logic is always a force for good, but it isn’t.

Josh Landy
I don’t think those climate deniers are using good logic, right? I mean, think about that senator who brought a snowball into Congress. His argument was obviously something like this. If the climate were actually warming, then winter wouldn’t be cold. But here’s a snowball. Ergo, nothing to see here. That’s not logic. That’s sophistry.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s where you’re wrong. Josh logicians would actually tell you that argument is valid.

Josh Landy
How on earth is that argument valid?

Ray Briggs
Well, though the technical term, it doesn’t mean that the argument makes a good point or anything, it just means the conclusion follows logically from the premises, which it does. If all the premises were true, the conclusion would have to be true too.

Josh Landy
Yeah, okay. But in the snowball argument, the premises are not all true. One of the premises was that if the world were getting hotter, we wouldn’t have harsh winters. If people were better at reasoning, they’d see how silly that is.

Ray Briggs
If I had had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. Come on. People aren’t better at reasoning. I want tools for persuasion that work in the actual world, not in cloud cuckoo land where you apparently live.

Josh Landy
But that’s my point, Ray. I think we should change the world wherein we need to teach more logic in high school and require more of it in universities. Logic is too precious to be hoarded by a few people at a few fancy schools. Let’s give it to the whole world.

Ray Briggs
If we’re going to tackle the big problems, we’re going to need a lot more than logic. We need empathy, and art and collective action.

Josh Landy
Well, hey, I love all of those things. But we are also going to need logic, right? How are you going to organize for that collective action? If you can’t persuade people to sign up.

Ray Briggs
But I still don’t think logic is what persuades people. Hey, case in point, many your arguments has convinced me.

Josh Landy
Okay, well, maybe our guest will show you the flaws in your reasoning, Ray. It’s Patrick Girard, author of “Logic in the Wild.”

Ray Briggs
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out what happens when people draw similar conclusions from different experiences. She files this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Vegetarianism is as old as some of the world’s earliest civilizations. In both ancient and modern India, for example, millions of people follow a vegetarian or even a completely vegan lifestyle. For many, it’s part of the Hindu faith. These days, though, vegetarians and vegans have a myriad other reasons for their choices. Here are just a few of them.

Ranjini
My name is Ranjini and I’m from Tempe, Arizona. I was born in Chennai, and then my family moved to the US when I was pretty young. I remember my dad saying, like, well, what right do we have to take another things life, like we got a lot of like scorpions here, for example. And so normal people will like kill the scorpion. My dad, however, will, in order to not kill another life, like sweep it up and hold it down in a dustpan and then throw it out into the backyard? Like, it’s a scorpion bad. Come on. That does not mean we don’t do pest control or whatever for like roaches and shit, because ew!

Anne
I’m Anne from Menlo Park, California, and I’m a registered nurse currently in nursing administration. I’m Filipino American. And I went vegetarian in 2017. Initially of our health reason, I was born and raised with a very meat heavy cuisine. Fast forward, I’m 32. And I go to my primary care provider, doing my annual checkup. And here I am thinking that I’m eating the right foods, you know, heavy on protein, I come to find out that I have high blood pressure, I have high cholesterol. I’m like borderline type two diabetes. Like if I don’t get my act together, I’m gonna be on insulin. And so I told my provider that hey, let me see if I can switch up what I’m eating. Cut out all animal meats to include fish. I know. In my culture, fish is not considered animal meat. And so, sure enough, I started feeling a change in myself. I started having more energy, was able to keep up with my young kids at the time running around. And so I wanted to be able to continue living and thriving for my kids.

Karen
My name is Karen Rubio, and I live in Los Gatos, California. I am now almost 63 years old, and I am plant based for health and for the environment. Most people focus on fossil fuels. But what they’re not aware of is that industrial animal agriculture, which has been in existence for the last 6080 years, is the driving force behind deforestation and biodiversity loss. And it is also a major factor in greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, chemical pollution and water scarcity. The challenges that we face, the environment is probably the key one. Because if we make our Earth unlivable, nothing else we do is going to matter much.

Beth
This is Beth from New York City. I’m 54 years old. I’ve been a vegan for around 20 years, I had this story that I was writing a travel story about the new aquarium. And this woman who works there gave me a tour and she was pointing out all these different fish and she was like, oh, there’s Bob. There’s Shelly. Oh, look how beautiful her skills are. And telling me stories about all their personalities and was like, Oh my God, why am I eating fish? Like, because I stopped eating meat because of animal rights because of viewing animals as equal to humans in so many ways. We kind of compartmentalize different types of animals like which animals deserve to be eaten or which animals shouldn’t be eaten. My wife and I have raised our daughter vegan, she’s 15 She has this friend who’s like won’t buy makeup unless it’s cruelty free. So it’s like you just had chicken or lunch. What are you talking about?

Pulp Fiction
Want some bacon? No man, I don’t eat pork. Are you Jewish? No I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all. Why not? Pigs are filthy animals; I don’t eat filthy animals.

Sarah Lai Stirland
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that highly logical report, Sarah. I’m Josh Landy, speaking with my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about logic for everyone.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Patrick Gerard. He’s professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and author of “Logic in the Wild.” Patrick, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Patrick Girard
Thank you, very pleased to be here.

Josh Landy
So Patrick, you’ve written fantastic books on logic, but until now, not for the average person like me. So what got you interested in everyday reasoning? Was it holiday meal gone wrong?

Patrick Girard
What happened is my husband made me aware of an activist group in my neighborhood. They’re composed of business owners, and significant portion of a rainbow community, and, and very interesting population. But most of their activism was against the building of cycle line in my neighborhood, which I didn’t like so much. So I started interacting with them, and especially on Facebook, and Twitter, and social media, as we all aware can make these debates exceedingly toxic. And it made me realize that logic is perhaps more needed than ever and reminded me of the role of logicians since the ancient world basically, to help society having better discussion, better deliberation.

Ray Briggs
So Patrick, you’ve just told us that regular people should learn more about logic. So what would be the benefits of doing that?

Patrick Girard
There’s several benefits, you can think of the benefits at the individual level. And one of the benefit I really like to think of is that logic helps us slowing down our reasoning that our psychology makes us think very quickly on our feet with mental reflexes that help us making quick decisions, but in a complex world, that can lead us astray. And then we need to think it through and logic can really help us sorting out why it is that we have these ideas and figuring out our thoughts and our beliefs.

Ray Briggs
So wait, wait, wait. Usually, when somebody tries to sell me on the benefits of something, they don’t tell me, it’s going to help you do a task you have to do but slower. Why is it good to sleep?

Patrick Girard
I know that everything is going so quick these days, perhaps that is exactly what we need to sit down and take our time and think it through and we’ll make less mistakes. We’ll save time perhaps on the long run.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like okay, logic helps us slow down. And that’s gonna allow us to make better decisions, decisions that we’re in the long run happy with decisions that I guess allow us to achieve our goals and maybe live authentically live the life that we actually really want. Is that about right?

Patrick Girard
That sounds right. To me. It’s not one guarantee that we all make the always make the right decision, of course, but I do like the way you phrase it as being more authentic, because we will own our reasons and our processes better.

Ray Briggs
That’s great for me if logic helps me be more authentic. But what if my asset authentic self is kind of a jerk? Could it be bad for society for me to know too much logic?

Patrick Girard
For society, it’s a second benefit of logic that I see how it can be applied in the community. And it is true that if you’re a jerk, and you can use logic to your nefarious ends, but I want to hope that in the community will help normalizing our interactions. But I do like to think for the society that it’s helpful to think of logic as providing a neutral space of dialectical inquiry.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s a mouthful, Patrick.

Patrick Girard
It is, going to unpack it a little bit. So dialectic, being the process of looking at an issue from different perspectives. And if there’s several of us, then basically each of us will give a different perspective. And an inquiry is when we try to investigate and figure out what it is that we think on the issue or what we need to do. But neutrality is where the logic kicks in. And neutrality is to seek a better balance in what’s enforced and what’s accepted in the space of this inquiry, and especially that no one’s beliefs or opinions or privilege over that of others.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about logic for everyone with Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland.

Ray Briggs
Are you ever annoyed when people try to argue with you? Or do you get frustrated when others refuse to be reasoned with? Has logic ever led you astray?

Josh Landy
To bait deduction and digging in your heels along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tracy Chapman
Said I don’t want to leave you lonely, you gotta make me change my mind.

Josh Landy
Are you going to change your mind based on how you feel or based on reasons and logic? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk that program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. And we’re thinking about logic for everyone with Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland, author of “Logic in the Wild.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about the logic of logic, email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Patrick, we’ve been talking about how logic can help you live more authentically and be in a space of public reasons with others. But does it actually persuade anybody?

Patrick Girard
It can help if the people you’re talking to are receptive to argumentation that are logical. Perhaps it’s perhaps not the best way to persuade, oftentimes, using bad logic might be more persuasive, because it may incite passions and rhetorical trick. But I would hope that if we’re seeking truth and sort of good decisions together, that we would want to have a common agreement on having good reasons. And then I would hope that it can help at least settling, setting the issues in better ways.

Josh Landy
And one of the things that I found helpful in some circumstances is trying to understand somebody else’s argument from the inside. Yeah. Which can can go one of two ways, right? One can be oh, oh, I see what you’re saying. Maybe I was wrong, which is good. Yeah. And another can be, oh, now I understand how your argument works. I can start to try to appeal to your own beliefs. Exactly. And try to persuade you using your, your own reasoning and say, well, actually, you notice that those two things don’t go together?

Patrick Girard
Absolutely not as one of the most positive use of logic, I would say, because we don’t need to challenge what your premises where I can just go with where you started from, but help you figuring out how far you can go. And perhaps you’ve, you’ve gone wrong somewhere and we can figure it out together, you will learn something about yourself. And I will learn something about you and just overall in general. So we’re seeking to establish coherence in your thoughts, and I’m helping you in that enterprise. And that’s perfectly constructive and positive.

Ray Briggs
So this seems really good when the people I’m talking to want to cooperate with me, and we want to do a cooperative endeavor,

Josh Landy
Just like people on Facebook.

Ray Briggs
But I think that this suggests that like, we’re gonna have to do more things, because often the people around me don’t want to cooperate with me. What good is logic when I’m in an adversarial setting,

Patrick Girard
it is difficult indeed. But at least if you’re not contributing to the fights over the premises, you’re not lighting that fire. And you can instead, try and join them on their own ground and trying to make your point by getting closer to what they’re saying, if not fully with them, at least you can approach them. So at least you’re doing your part. Like, if you come and fight me, I don’t have to punch back.

Josh Landy
That’s, I mean, that I like not being punched back. And not punching. And that’s that’s, it sounds like it’s cautiously optimistic thought about the use of logic, even in adversarial spaces. Presumably, it’s even better in, for example, the scientific community or philosophical community where people really are I take it using logic to work together exactly to the common aim of learning about the world.

Patrick Girard
Exactly. I do think that in academia, in general, in the universities, people have that ability to use logic to those lands, and we can disagree and we can explore each other’s ideas. And it’s perhaps a shame that this is not reflected overall in society. But I would think perhaps it is one of our roles in general to to be role models of these kinds of interactions and dialogues. And opposition’s and back and forth.

Ray Briggs
So this actually brings me to a question I’ve been wondering about, because I’ve spent a lot of time studying logic, any university, and don’t get me wrong, I love it. But it’s a lot of weird symbols and fiddly math the way I study it.

Patrick Girard
Tasty symbols.

Ray Briggs
Yes. So how does that connect to the kind of everyday reasoning we’ve been talking about here?

Patrick Girard
So I like to think of logic as being the guardian of coherence. Right? So we’re seeking good patterns of reasonings in general. And in that framework, one reason to have symbols is is a quest in mathematical enterprises to guard coherence by consistency, so that means avoiding contradictions and then the use of symbols when you’re studying mathematics as in the way that you’ve been trained before. was a very useful to approach to approach that mathematical discipline. I think perhaps a mistake that we have done in the 20th century is to think that this is the way to do logic. But I do think that God incoherence can be done in a more general kind of way. And that we can seek different standards of coherence that are more effective in everyday reasoning. So they correspond to mathematical reasoning, in being systematic and coherent, but then don’t necessarily need to be formalized in the ways that mathematics requires it.

Josh Landy
All right, so I’ll bite, let’s say, you know, we could all do with a little bit more formal reasoning in our lives. How formal like, do I, you know, do I need to take a class? Do I need to read some books? Or can I just sort of, you know, try a little harder.

Patrick Girard
Okay, interesting. A class will never hurt, I don’t know that you need to go full blown symbolic logic as we teach at university, I think some basics and critical thinking can give you the guiding principles that you might be after. But it’s it that I do see it as well as a disposition to being able to engage with others, not by challenging the premises, but just trying to understand the coherence in their views and exploring the structure and the patterns of their reasoning.

Josh Landy
So okay, here’s a specific way of asking the question, are there any particular bad habits of mind that we need to be aware about things that you might learn in the class, or you might just find out about on social media or somewhere else that you might not have thought about, right, and if you’re not aware of them, they might sort of drop you into a into a hole, you know, cognitively speaking.

Patrick Girard
I mean, we know about psychological biases that we all have, like the confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, and that’s just part of our psychology. And we deal with that all the time. And until you made aware of them, you might not notice that you’re applying it all the time. So that may be one way. But we also get bad logical habits, just by not being aware of certain kinds of patterns. And the thing is that in most logic in everyday life, I would think the logic is fairly simple. It’s not like you need dude, like formalize with very complex mathematics, the patterns are fairly simple. And the bad patterns are also fairly simple and closely resemble the good ones. And unless we’re attuned to it, we might not notice.

Speaker 1
So could you walk me through a concrete example, where people might make a mistake if they didn’t think hard enough about the logic, but thinking about logic could help them correct the mistake?

Patrick Girard
Yeah, okay. So here’s a little example, for relationships. Um, suppose I tell you that, if you love me, then you will buy me a diamond ring. Right? And I might follow you up on that by buying you a diamond ring. And especially not because I love you, but because I want to fool you into thinking that I love you.

Ray Briggs
But wait, if you love me, then you’d buy me a diamond ring. So doesn’t the diamond ring mean that you love me?

Patrick Girard
That’s the wrong way around. And that’s where the logical trap is. And that’s it. I was saying that good arguments resemble bad arguments. And that would be the right way around that I might I may show to you that I love you by buying you a diamond ring. But there’s other ways of showing my love.

Josh Landy
And conversely, maybe you buy the diamond ring without loving me. Exactly. Just because you want to get me off your back. Yeah. And so that sounds like yeah, it’s a case where I’m sure logicians have a name for that kind of fallacy. Yes, that’s affirming the consequent, you don’t need to know that name. Exactly. You just need to know. Don’t be fooled if somebody buys you a diamond. Right? That’s right.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about logic for everyone with Patrick Girard, from the University of Auckland.

Josh Landy
What about other cases in the world of love? So for example, jealousy. Right, one of my favorite authors preusse talks a lot about jealousy and jealousy can sort of look like the reasoning faculty gone horribly awry, right, where everything starts to look like a clue. And you become a detective. And you think, wow, but she said this, but then she said that, and then she wasn’t there, and she came home late. And so is jealousy, a case where our instinct to use logic can actually send us astray? Or is it a case where maybe logic could help us out?

Patrick Girard
It may, but that takes us back to what I was saying about slowing down our thinking. Because I would think jealousy, there’s a lot of passion involved in it. There’s an emotional content to it that feels very lively and strong from what I understand. And but if we start looking at the evidence that this leads us to inquire, but we appreciate that we can slow down and think it through we might realize that All the evidence that we think support, our jealousy actually fails to do it. So it might at least make us see that this is a reflex here that I really well supported. And then there’s other ways it might not fix your jealousy, but at least it might indicate you and point you in a different direction.

Speaker 1
This kind of brings up a question for me about the relationship between logic and capacities that might call rhetoric. So one way to deal with jealousy is to learn about managing your emotions. And you might do that by imagining things from your partner’s point of view, or thinking about different ways that you could reframe what’s happening or thinking about sort of things that give you a source of, of self confidence and value. So you don’t have to rely so much on your partner’s not paying attention to anybody else ever. Those don’t seem like logic, but they do seem like important reasoning capacities that have more to do with emotion and rhetoric. What do you see? Is their relationship to logic?

Patrick Girard
are you pointing at something that is closer to something like empathy, perhaps, yeah, you need to empathize with your partner and sort of like transpose yourself and be in their shoes so as to be able to appreciate how they’re living that situation. And that could inform you is what you’re sort of where you’re pointing at?

Speaker 1
So I’m thinking empathy is one of the skills but also just skills like identifying which emotion that you’re feeling. And taking a step back from your emotions. Like that doesn’t seem exactly like logic, but it seems important.

Patrick Girard
No, I would appreciate it not not sure that there’s some psychological work to be done in its various approach to dealing with powerful emotions such as jealousy, I’m logic might be a guide into at least make you realize that it doesn’t stack up and slow you down and you know, put a stop to your emotional track. And then, and then, and then you might investigate in different ways. And it’s I’m not saying that logic is necessary to get you there, either. Right?

Ray Briggs
Right. Does logic help with these other skills? Is it just a completely independent thing? Is it at odds with these other skills? Like what’s, what’s the relationship there?

Patrick Girard
Well, if I can take you back to thinking about empathy, what I think is that logic gives us a simpler way of appreciating someone else’s perspective, because we don’t need to like gain that whole emotional baggage and live their whole experiences, we can just seek to appreciate the coherence and how they’re functioning. And there’s an imaginative shift here, and that’s happening. But it doesn’t require the full blown psychological empathy move here.

Josh Landy
I’m sort of interested in where the limits of logics, assistance are, right? Because, you know, you started with that wonderful and slightly scary story about the local group that’s arguing against bike lanes. Yes. That seems like a case where a little more logic would probably help. Yes. But then you think about areas of one’s life like, you know, choosing a life partner or something like that. You think, Well, how am I? How logical should you really be about that? Does logic play a role in that kind of aspect of life?

Patrick Girard
It could play a part of a role and parents mind a long term situation that you want to make sure that you can understand the coherence in your partner’s worldview, so that you can on a daily basis, you’ll be confronted all the time. And if it keeps clashing and classic, that may not work all that good. But I would think like if when in the initial phases of dating, there’s other aspects of the chemistry between the people and and the sharing of emotions and activities and patterns that, you know, it’s a very rich kind of relationship. So I wouldn’t think that logic is the guiding line here. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be involved somehow, like you need a bit of security on the coherence of the other person. But that’s only a tiny part of the white and that’s okay.

Ray Briggs
So this lovey dovey stuff is very nice. But I want more examples of how logic can help me reason about sort of the political issues of my day. Do you have an example of that, Patrick?

Patrick Girard
I’ve got on my hand, it’s a bit hard, especially if you’re seeking for positive ways of thinking about political issues, as if logic could provide you guidance into formulating the right belief in this political context on the certain kind of issues. Oftentimes, I would think that logic is best applied in a more negative kind of way. As you’ve probably been trained logicians are very good at showing that arguments are not coherent or invalid. And it’s a slightly more negative view. But I don’t mean negative in a negative way. I just means that it is an approach. It’s more guarding you against the incoherence that happens in this political world.

Josh Landy
And yeah, presumably, that’s a good way of warding off the dangers of propaganda, right, because you’ve talked about this the way in which there are you know, there’s this sort of whole whole cut industry out there of the construction of misleading arguments about things like, you know, oil, or tobacco, or, you know, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and in some sports, how do we, you know, how do we use logic to help ourselves and other people not be taken in by that propaganda because presumably, that’s, that’s a step in the right direction when it comes to some of these big social issues that are facing us.

Patrick Girard
Especially in the sort of populist politicians that we see on the rise these days. And they go with confiscation if that’s a word. obfuscation of use gation is the word I’m looking for. Thank you, office Keishon, which is going very much against logic. But then if we can spot that, and the more people that notice that this is not okay, that we need, reasoning to form better opinions, the more the more the more advanced that will be trained and attuned to it, the more we’ll be able to have a voice in this democratic context.

Ray Briggs
I like this vision a lot. I think I’m worried about sort of misuses of the idea of logic to dismiss good arguments. So like, there’s nothing more infuriating than giving people some good data from the CDC, and telling them, here’s how to fix your public health issue and having them say, that’s a fallacy you’ve appealed to authority. I’m more logical than you. How do we go?

Patrick Girard
Yeah, it’s frustrating. I’m with you on that one. But there’s, you know, at some point, this goes beyond logic, and it’s about disposition to be a better citizen. It’s about the characters of all of us. And it is annoying, and logic can be used for negative negatively in the bad sense, not in the constructive volume, finding errors in reasoning.

Josh Landy
So is there is there a remedy to that?

Patrick Girard
More logic.

Josh Landy
I knew you’d say that.

Ray Briggs
I want to come back to the bike lanes that you’ve mentioned a couple of times, because I still don’t quite understand how logic would have helped people figure out what to do about the bike lanes? Can you walk me through that?

Patrick Girard
A lot of the reasoning of that group was fairly out there. And there was a conspiracy involved where basically, they thought that the bike lanes were constructed to stop people from driving from small community centers and be forced to go to big molds that were owned by international money. And so there was that big conspiracy, and it’s a conspiracy like many other conspiracies, that kind of makes sense and explains small events with big causes. And it’s in signing and everything. And I think, I think having a better understanding of logical reasoning, and perhaps in this case, uses of explanation to inference to best explanation and most sophistication, buttons of reasoning might help a group of people realizing that these types of reasoning just don’t add up, due to the fear that animate them. And I do appreciate that changing a neighborhood is threatening to a set of business owners. But that doesn’t mean that any kind of big stories that support their views actually support them.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about logic for everyone with Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland, author of “Logic in the Wild.”

Ray Briggs
Would more logic make the world a better place? Do you use it to explain things to your kids? Can it even persuade them to do their chores?

Josh Landy
Syllogisms for success—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Green Day
I have no belief but I believe I’m a walking contradiction and I ain’t got no right.

Josh Landy
Do you walk around refuting yourself? Maybe you need more logic in your life? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland. And we’re thinking about logic for everyone.

Josh Landy
So Patrick, you were just saying something really interesting about your interactions with the bike lane skeptics and saying that you didn’t think they were using logic correctly that they you know that they’re entitled to their their opinions and their beliefs so you can completely empathize with their worries, but really, they should have been constructing better arguments to support them. How did that go over when you told them? One doesn’t always find people receptive to being told your arguments are terribe.

Patrick Girard
I’m afraid to say they won the battle and they stopped the construction of the cycle lanes in our neighborhood. And so it is it’s not like logic will solve all our world problems. But I tried. But

Josh Landy
is it a good conversational gambit to say to somebody, Hey, I’m a professional logician, here are the three things that are wrong with your argument.

Patrick Girard
I usually don’t come up with that opening. Pointing out that people are being illogical can be very much seen as a threat, because you, all of a sudden you, you start attacking their integrity. And that doesn’t work all that well. So it is a bit tricky, and oftentimes offering different alternative different explanations. If done in a diplomatic way, and trying to be constructive, and as much as we can, may, may help just that. We do need better public transport. And if we can have better public transport, it could be that we transform a community to which people are using more bicycles and bus lanes and perhaps increase the number of customers in the shops, it does need a transformation, and especially in the mind of the business owners, but that may very well happen. And it’s a problem of showing that there’s some evidence that oftentimes shop owners overestimate the number of people that come to their shop in a single car use. I think these arguments have been used, but with limited results. But so it is that’s not going to stop me from trying to apply and teach logic.

Ray Briggs
So Patrick, we sometimes do this thing with our guests, we make them czar for the day. So I think it would make sense to make use czar of logic education. If you had this amazing power, what would be your first act, Azhar to help more people be able to access the benefits of logic?

Patrick Girard
Get ride of social media. I know this is not the most practical, and it’s probably a reasonable but I’m design, I want to go for it. For a few things. I do think that social media tends to reinforce very quick thinking. And sort of almost like a voting procedures on opinions. It’s more like sharing opinions and finding the people that share our opinions and, you know, things like the like button on Facebook. So it’s tends to divide issues into opposites, and then polarizes us because um, if Josh says something that is a bit more extreme than my own opinion, I might still like it, because I’d rather be in his camp than in the opposite camp. And then it keeps dividing and dividing. And, and then social media, like acts just don’t favor arguments. It’s mostly strong statement assertions of opinions and share sharing opinions. And at that point, logic is just out of the of the of the picture altogether.

Ray Briggs
It’s interesting to me that you’ve gone for social media abolition, rather than social media redesign, do you think the whole concept is just doomed to make people illogical?

Patrick Girard
I think if there was a redesign possible, I don’t think it’s only at the level of the social media, it’s probably more of a societal redesign of, of, of the structure of society. That’s not all driven by markets. Unfortunately, the social medias are driven by markets and cliques. And it’s a business model. And to the extent that it is a business model, it will keep trying to get our attention, our likes, and make money out of us. And so long as it’s driven by these forces. It’s not going to reinforce logic and slow thinking. Remember that I want us to slow down.

Josh Landy
I’m with you on that. I mean, are there other recommendations that you’d have you know whether or not we can succeed in getting rid of social media.

Patrick Girard
Perhaps more reasonable. So with the rise of the language models such as Chad GPT, I’d like I’d like to find a way for these models to be better at appreciating the importance of coherence for human interaction. At the moment, they tend to create word salads in a predictive in a probabilistic way. And they go work by word by word. And for people trained in logic like me, it’s fairly easy to make them do fundamental mistakes in logic. And it’s the nature of the thing. So I don’t know what it means to fix it in that kind of way. But imposing a structure of coherence on top of the production of texts might at least steer humans into more coherent reasoning.

Ray Briggs
Do you worry that this would make them just outsource their reasoning to a different thing that they didn’t really understand? And rather than having to do the hard work of thinking through their arguments,

Patrick Girard
yes, I think that is a problem within language models. But I’m How can we stop that? I mean, if you make me so far, I will banish social media and language models as well. And then we won’t need to worry about it. But isn’t that oily? So at that point, that’s a huge problem. Parents for education in general, how do we train humans to still be able to function in a complex world where we can outsource most of our reasoning to AI?

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s a big challenge, right? What do you say to people who are worried about logic, I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of people who pride themselves on being rational. And there’s a lot of people who don’t really care much either way. But then there’s also people and I think in various traditions and philosophy, people like Henri Beck song, said, you know, what your rational mind is just leading you astray, you really need intuition. That’s what’s gonna get you the truth. And you have people like, you know, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, saying that this whole enlightenment rationality thing was kind of a bad move, it led to some really bad consequences. So what do you say to people in those traditions who, who have some serious concerns about logic and think that there’s some dangers involved in excessively using our logic to understand human and social phenomena? Do you try to persuade them out of it?

Patrick Girard
No, I agree with him. I think that’s, I think that’s very much true, like an excessive use of logic, especially if logic is meant to be equated with rationality. And reason. Definitely, that can be a problem, it can lead us to a technocrat sort of mathematical world that is super rigid. And I can see the fear in that. And I do not think that the solution is necessarily the rejection of logic altogether. Just circling back to my, to my characterization of logic as garden garden coherence. I don’t see that as going against and more intuitive reasoning for to use the word that there was that you’ve been using. Intuitive reasoning doesn’t have to be incoherent. It’s not an doesn’t have to be clashing with this more general sense of logic. So I totally appreciate the criticism taken on board. And let’s great, I appreciate it.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve been talking about sort of things we would get rid of, if we wanted people to be more logical and things that just interfere with their ability to learn logic. Once the noise was gotten rid of, what might you add to society to help people be better at logic?

Patrick Girard
Yeah, maybe some, some framework in which we can get communities to deliberate. Instead of having jury duty, it would be deliberation duty, where we take a group of people, and we put them in a room to talk and think deeply about deep issues, such as abortion and all these deep issues that we have in society, and we get them we give them time, let them think slowly, and in a dialectical way, when we can try and appreciate all kinds of points of view and, and find together ways of moving forward in society.

Josh Landy
Oh, that sounds like a lovely idea. I mean, we have some things that are a little bit like that today. Like we have townhall debates, and we have, you know, Intelligence Squared and Oxford debating society and things like that. Yeah. Are they close enough? Or are they just sort of beside the point?

Patrick Girard
I think that was not exactly what I was envisaged, because those are very quick stone, like a debate that well, a debate debating society is more like a sports or a game. And there’s your scoring point, and trying to win as opposed to trying to seek truth. So but town halls and debates, yeah. And that can lead them. But if if we have a couple of hours and 200 people, it can degenerate into a shouting match very quickly. I’m thinking more about, you know, let’s put people like juries for two three weeks, and guide their reasoning and really take time to explore various ideas. I believe there has been some kind of experiments there. So logic duty.

Ray Briggs
Love it. Yeah, no, I’ve heard about sort of deliberative democracy experiments with sort of Citizens Councils that just get together and have a conversation, like a structured conversation about issues that affect their communities. So maybe the opposite of the bike lane thing.

Patrick Girard
Exactly. But taking the time to do it really allows people to appreciate each other’s point of view. And why is that is next to impossible on social media and in shouting matches of debates.

Josh Landy
So what would your you know, if you had a few sort of bullet point recommendations, someone who’s thinking either about a major decision that they want to make in their life or about a major difficult social problem like climate change or, or a vexed question like abortion? Do you have specific recommendations I like for example, talk to people who don’t agree with you slow down will be on your list.

Patrick Girard
Those sounded great. It’s a negotiation trying to figure out what you believe in and what you can believe in. So what do you what are your initial beliefs and opinions and then try to figure out how you can back them up. And that can be doing some research talking to people. And then in the way you will see alternative views, you might realize that your original opinions don’t exactly work and the way you formulate them, and then you will revise them and adapt and change and it’s a disposition to be prepared to change your mind.

Josh Landy
Well, Patrick, this has been not just a very reasonable conversation, but extremely enjoyable conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Patrick Girard
Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Patrick Girard, professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland here in New Zealand, and author of “Logic in the Wild.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I’m thinking first, I’m going to go relax with a nice logic textbook. But after that, I’m going to go relax by watching the most emotional television series I can find because I think I need both of those things in my life.

Josh Landy
What series would that be, Ray?

Ray Briggs
I think somebody somewhere is it’s a real like, heart string grabber. Recommend i.

Josh Landy
Ok then after that, after that you can buy me a diamond ring.

Ray Briggs
Well, I don’t know. It won’t prove that I love you.

Josh Landy
Fair enough. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today, except for I guess diamond shopping on our websit,e philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and leaf logically through our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now… Faster than a speeding syllogism—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Logic is one of those things we used to think was vitally important not only to advanced reason but to the simple can do spirit.  Now it’s become so important it can’t be entrusted to ordinary citizens.  We need a Mr. Spock, a Data, a computer with a sexy voice who can set us straight, Sherlock Holmes, or some other super detective.  The rest of us just play hunches or cheat.  However, because we think of ourselves as shrewd, we still have logic in the attic of our brain but it’s dusty and we call it common sense.  Where it has led, among other places, to the persistence of the flat earth theory.  You can see the edge of the world.  It’s right there!  You going to trust astronauts or your own eyes?  Logic is one of the great legacies gifted us by the ancient ones of Greece and Rome, along with rhetoric, theater, poetry, philosophy, architecture, and ruthless imperialism.  Rhetoric used to be taught in schools, but it’s kind of fallen by the wayside, along with Latin, home ec, and shop.  Back in the ancient days, I’ll bet audiences attended speeches with an internal checklist to see what figures of speech were employed, and how well they were used.  Metonymy especially I imagine was treasured and would earn a special entry in the spectator debate club check list.  Along with deportment, and how the speaker looked in a swimsuit.  We’ve lost so much.  But if we aren’t so logical any more, we’re certainly fond of fallacies. Can’t go through a day on social media without some commenter or other saying a claim was begging the question.  Now I must confess, and maybe it’s because I’ve gotten old, that I always get begging the question and raising a question mixed up.  But hey!  We all do!  Begging the question would be like, “Latin should be taught in schools again because Latin SHOULD be taught in schools.”  See?  There’s no question, and no begging, ipso facto, qed.  Begging the question which is, Sir?  Where’s the begging? It’s a bit like circular reasoning, I think, which would be, walking is good for you, therefore it’s healthy to walk.  Most television commercials employ this to good effect.  And they are both related to the straw man fallacy.  Which is, I say, I think cars are dangerous, and you say, oh, you think cars should be banned eh?  And suddenly we are both driving a straw car.  Straight down a slippery slope.  There are variants to the straw!  In this, our Trumpy world, we often see premises that begin with “Some say that” or “A lot of people think.”  This is the hollow man argument.  There’s also Q Anon, a common source for iffy citations. Conservatives in general just throw fallacies around like confetti.  People who voluntarily live in a corrupt hellhole like San Francisco shouldn’t be allowed to vote.  Everybody says so!  Oh there’s a variation on cherry picking data, called “nut picking,” where they find the most extreme non representative fringe person from your group, quote a random statement from that person and claim that therefore your statement is invalid.  Which is what I just did kind of!  Another good example of a straw man.  I claim that marijuana should be legal.  You claim that unrestricted access to drugs will lead to the collapse of society.  Cool!  Oh no.  This is a straw man and also a slippery slope argument.  And hasty generalizations can make us jump to conclusions, from whence we fall.  Down that slippery slope.  You might could say that using logic to question logic is a straw man argument.  But after all, it’s easy to imitate logic.  Which is why con men are so successful.  Of course we are often willing participants in our own delusions.  Does that makes sense?  Say yes.  If you said yes, well, there you go am I right?  Of course I am.   I’m not fond of this particular piece, but I’m this far now, I better finish it.  That is the Sunk cost fallacy.  Or “Why are we in Viet nam?”   Question authority.  Begs the question.  Is that an authoritative statement?  Well, it’s all designed to persuade people that we are good at persuasion.  But we don’t even need that any more.  Want me to vote for you, Mr. Trump? Sure! Sir, says America.  Sir!  Take my money.  Please!  It’s only logical. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devon Stolovitch. Laura Mauire is our Director of Research

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Petro Jimenez, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, from subscribers to our online community of thinkers, and from the members of KALW San Francisco, where our program originates,

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy .

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Crimes and Misdemeanors
Sol’s kind of faith is a gift. It’s like an ear for music or the talent to draw. He believes, and you can use logic on them all day long and he still believes. Must everything be logical?