A reader writes:
I have to write an essay about " why logic is important " in my philosophy class, but i donot have many ideas to write it. Can you help me or show me how to fine some informations online.
A) The basic reason why logic is important is that the rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning. Therefore, if you wanted to take a bit of a risk you could simply turn in the following as your essay:
- The rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning.
- It is important to use the rules of good reasoning.
- Therefore, it is important to use the rules of logic.
B) I suspect that your teacher may be looking for a bit more than that, though, and the most promising way to flesh out the paper, it seems to me, would be to talk about logical fallacies.
To emphasize the importance of logic, I’d give a bunch of examples (the more practical, the better) in which people commit logical fallacies and show how this harms them in important ways. (Thomas Sowell is a great source for exposing various fallacies and how they hurt the poor, but if your philosophy teacher is a rabid leftie, you might ought to stay away from using examples from him.)
C) If you want to grab for the brass ring, you might write a paper in which you yourself commit numerous fallacies one after the other in such a fashion that it is clear to your teacher that you not only know the fallacies, you understand them so well that you are committing them deliberately to illustrate the value of logic in a backhand way. That, however, is a risky strategy, for if you get the fallacies wrong or don’t make it sufficiently clear that their use is tongue-in-cheek then you may get lower marks. If you can pull it off, though, your teacher will be delighted.
All told, I’d probably recommend the middle, pedestrian strategy (i.e., B).
Hope this helps!
Your paper could also include a section on why, although logic is important, it is not ALL-IMPORTANT. Ala the lessons Kirk and McCoy worked so heard to teach Spock.
Discarding the political leanings of the professor, using unproven (and largely unprovable) economic examples is about the weakest basis you could use for a paper on logic. If there isn’t a very compelling reason to do so, don’t mix disciplines in a basic paper.
A quick Google search will reveal countless examples of logical fallacies illustrated with clear rhetorical examples, with no moral interpretation needed to see why the conclusions based on the fallacy are incorrect.
Passing in a paper on logic that depends on the trickle-down theory of economics is a good way to get a bad economics mark in philosophy class!
I just started reading Peter Kreeft’s textbook “Socaratic Logic.” You might be able to get significant help from reading/perusing the book. He presents many logical fallacies in the book with examples and exercises. And of course, since it is a textbook, some of the answers are in the back!
Allen White: You appear not to have read what I wrote. Nor, it is clear, have you read any substantial amount by Sowell. If you read his writings, you would know that Sowell heaps scorn on the idea of “trickle-down economics.”
That, however, is of little import here as I did not recommend the discussion of *economic* fallacies. If you’d read Sowell (again, there’s that theme again) you’d know that he often points out *classical logical fallacies* in the works of others, making his columns a fertile source of real-world examples of people committing the fallacies. He doesn’t use the technical jargon of informal logic much, but he’s regularly using its tools.
Try taking off the agenda-glasses before you go criticizing when one person is trying to help out another, how bout?
This post is very much helpful for my philosophy class. 🙂