Encefalus

A very simple title. What logic has to do with Encefalus, a blog that mainly deals with psychological issues?

Logic is something that I was always interested in, not for any special reason, but because I am a math-logic geek. But beyond that, I always believed that you can never really do science, unless you have a complete theory of what you can know and what you can’t. You can never be sure about the truth of your premises and statements, unless you know the rules that constitute a premise true.

I’ve been digging into this subject recently. There are many topics in logic that I haven’t studied thoroughly and I need to. However, when you start  to go a little further in the subject you start to think a lot about many things you didn’t previously. You start to question basic principles that you always took for granted.

So, the book I was reading lately was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. With Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittegenstein believed he had solved every problem of philosophy (even though he refuted many of his claims in Philosophical Investigations, which was published after his death).

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus deals with a lot of the fundamendal issues about how we know the world, and of what we can be certain. It is this thing that had me thinking a lot about about the relationship between psychology and philosophy. You see, in earlier times, philosophy was the only way of systematically dealing with a problem. Once the knowledge about a certain topic increases, it becomes a discipline unto itself and it becomes a branch of science. The first sciences that obviously did that were the physical sciences. Psychology didn’t constitute a science, until Wilhelm Wundt created the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.

Many philosophers have tried to search for the fundamendal truths we can take for granted. Descartes believed that we can be sure only for our existence. Kant and Wittgenstein speak for a thing-in-itself (although Wittgenstein doesn’t call it that way). The main idea behind all these is that we use our senses to identify things, and our senses are limited to one extent or the other. So, every man of logic, before he starts to ask questions about the universe, he should identify what he can know for sure, what he can try to find, and what he can never know.

Wilhelm Wundt

Of course, when most philosophers tried to investigate these questions, science had not advanced so much. Now, science has advanced so much that philosophy is deemed nearly useless. Most of the problems of philosophy can be answered by science.

For example, Wittgenstein believed that the limits of our world are defined by the limits of our language. However, Steven Pinker has noted in his book The Language Instict that this is completely wrong. For example, think of all the times that you are trying to say something, but can’t find the right words. Think of a melody. Are you thinking that melody in words? I don’t think so.

However, philosophy can still offer a lot to science and our everyday lives through logic. If you study logic and apply it to the everyday scientific practice and to your life, you won’t believe the things you’ll see that go wrong, but you believed they were right. I can offer some examples to see what I mean right here.

I was talking with a friend the other day. I was telling him that a lot of greek university students immigrate to other european countries, because there you can make more money and live a better life. He told me, that if that was the case, then everyone would do it. So, let’s analyse this. Let’s take the logical premise that everyone does it. What happens in this case? If everyone discovered how profitable this can be, then everyone would immigrate, and the whole system would rebalance itself so as this behavior becomes the norm and isn’t exceptionally profitable anymore.

For those of you who didn’t get this right, take a look at that picture.

Normal distribution

This is called normal distribution. It is a curve that many things follow, like IQ. Bill Gates for example, is a person that belongs to the upper 0.2%. Let’s say that back in the 80s, everyone had the abilities of Bill Gates, so everyone was a computer wizard and had the idea and the discipline to work towards a computer revolution. Then, Bill Gates would immediately stop being in the upper 0.2% and would be in the 68% in the middle. Why? Because the system would rebalance itself!

IQ actually is one of the most well known entities that rebalance themselves over each generation. James R. Flynn described what we know as the Flynn Effect. That is, the increament of IQ in every generation for about 20 points. So, in every generation, what was previously considered brilliant, is now considered normal. This is why John McCain who is way past his age can’t get a thing about internet . For more on the Flynn Effect and what IQ constitutes (since it is a disputable topic, what IQ actually measures) you can read a previous article in Encefalus: How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this has to do with the Flynn effect

I’m sorry, but this ain’t no country for old men John…

I call the type of thinking we showed above reverse bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is a logical fallacy based on the following assumption: many people do it, so it must be right. In this scenario, we had the reverse type of thinking: if it was the right thing to do, then everyone would do it.

Other example I can offer is with the same guy. We were disputing over the number of cars in the city. You see, here, there are a LOT of cars, which obviously causes an immense amount of traffic, along with pollution and accidents. My position on the subject was that many people here just take the cars to the city center without any particular reason, other the fact that they are too bored to walk and that cars should be banned from some areas of high traffic. Then, my friend responded that maybe many people take the car for a case of medical emergency and the car is obviously a good means of transportation for such situations.

Join the wagon baby!!

Well, let’s analyse this premise. Let’s say that a lot of people every day use the car for a case of medical emergency. Then, what happens is that they get stuck in the traffic that they created. So, they fail to reach the hospitals and they die. And then, since there are less drivers, there is no traffic.

The second example was much simpler than the first and it surely touches subject such as traffic magement and urban planning, but we clearly saw that through the use of logic, even if it was a very simple case, we could see why this argument was wrong.

This is a very good way to use logic in your everyday life. When you make an assumption, take that premise as if it was true and see what happens. You’ll either see that the proposition is sound, or you’ll be lead into a reductio ad absurdum, thus proving that the first premise is wrong.

If you are thinking at what else this could be applied, besides traffic and Bill Gates, maybe you’ll be glad to learn about a guy named Galileo Galilei. The myth says that he discovered that all objects fall with the same speed by throwing two stones from the Tower of Piza. However, this is false. What he did, was take Aristotle’s premises about the heavier object falling first. So, let’s say that indeed the heavier objects fall before the lighter objects. What would happen if we had a heavy object attached to a light object? The heavy object would be pulled down at a speed equal to X, while the lighter object to a slower speed equal to X – P. Therefore, they heavy object should fall at the same time at a speed equal to X, but at the same time not fall at a speed equal to X, but slower, because it has a lighter object attached to it that slows it down. It is self-evident that this whole proposition is apparently false. Therefore, the only way to solve this problem is to accept the fact that all bodies fall at the same speed.

This example clearly proves the "magic" of logic. By sitting at your armchair you can sometimes discover things about the world that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Of course, science is science because it happens in the laboratory and not on the armchair. But, as it seems, the armchair can have its uses from time to time . After all, think of all the fallacies we perform in our everyday lives. Many people still believe that the heavier object fall first. Think of how many Holywood movies you’ve seen that the someone jumps from a cliff and then the hero jumps and reaches him (something which is clearly impossible).

The use of logic in everyday life has further implications. Just think of Wason’s selection task, where Wason proved how wrong our everyday logic can be.

There are more things I’d like to talk about in this post, but it has already become too large. We didn’t touch the subject of evolutionary theory, since evolution defines the way we think, thus limiting and defining the attempts of philosophers to discuss what constitutes truth and the thing-in-itself. We didn’t even talk about epistimology and the attempt to create a valid theory of knowledge. And we didn’t talk about the philosophy of morality and what it has to do with logic. However, we gave some good examples of how logic can have some applications in everyday life and science. Before we close, I want to include an entry in wikipedia with logical fallacies that we should avoid: List of logical falacies. For a list of cognitive fallacies go to: Cognitive Fallacies.

Logical fallacy…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Philosophical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.