Logic and the Question "Why"
May 30, 2024 9:34:44 GMT -8
Post by The Ninevite on May 30, 2024 9:34:44 GMT -8
The final moral word on philosophy is that it is in fact the art of answering the question why. If an obtrusion enters philosophy, it happened because the philosopher in question went ahead and asked why either before completing the analysis of the square, or in spite of the fact that the resulting syllogism was logically invalid. You don't need to know why something is unless there is a valid logic behind it. Logic is in the realm of morals. Reason is in sound aesthetics. There is a logic to engineering, building a useful machine that functions reliably is in the logical realm. A painting or a postage stamp, the flag, a corporate logo, or a symbol in sports or military communication is in the sound world of reasonable aesthetics. The difference is in the integral over time. Something that functions, a house whose roof keeps the rain off or a train that transports passengers, can be amortized. A symbol is timeless. Why does this matter? Because sense aesthetics, the reasonableness half of a binary logical agreement required for the final syllogism to be true, is the fiefdom of the moment. It belongs to the infinitesimal in calculus, and reasoning is done on the basis of a complete picture present all at the same moment in time. Reason is about the complete instantaneous picture, the painting on the canvass, or the statutory monument in the town square. Logic is not instantaneous, it pertains to series of linked and related events over the course of time, they can only be written down in dated chronological journals. A final syllogism, to be true, must both make sense, which is to say have reasonable postulates (for example, "Look at the Lincoln Memorial. It is made of white marble, located in Washington DC, and of a weighty substance) AND exhibit valid temporal logic. For example, "Look at all these New York Times photographs of the Civil War by Matthew Brady. Arranged in chronological order, they clearly show the logical process of the Civil War." That's the difference. Reasoning is done on the basis of a visible fact which can be sensed without analysis, it is used in the service of self-evident facts. Remember the Declaration of Independence? Jefferson holds creation, inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness reasonable assumptions. The rest of the document, however, relies on logic, as it's description of the abuses of the colonies by the crown require literate reference to the scribal bodies of separate documents promulgated as laws by King George. That's the difference. Reason: conducted pertaining to immediately sensible facts in the world around us, like the existence of God or the presence of a rushing river. Logic: conducted solely on the readings of written manuscripts, inclusive of Congressional Bills, Prophetic Scrolls, and long Russian Novels by contemporaries of the Revolution.
Regarding certain people who at times can seem to blather on endlessly as to "why", often while speaking in circles to their tales and never producing a rhetorically finished complete logical paragraph using genuine grammar, it is worthy of note that in classical philosophy, the original "why" was asked regarding to the apparent angle against the horizon formed by the procession of the equatorial constellations. The question was asked by Thales why the Milky Way band of stars, as it apparently orbits the globe as does the Sun, albeit much more slowly, describes a trajectory arc across the sky which is different in kind and in cadence than the one traversed daily by the Sun.
The first Greek Philosophical "why" asked by Thales about the procession of the equinoxes, is that in fact the Earth tilts on a polar axis of rotation. Also, for geometry fans and excited students whose Trigonometry books are bursting off the shelves, please note that the word "tangent" and the "tangent point" were both created or first used to describe the relationship between the abstractly linear helical risings of the seasonal Zodiac star clusters, and the horizon point over which they rise. This point is stationary (absolute with reference to the procession of the stars) and it also has an absolute antipode, at which the seasonal (lunar month's) rising equatorial constellation sets in the morning at daybreak.
In answer to the preacher who keeps on telling people not to ask why, the most relevant fact of the matter is that logic is both physical and metaphysical. Physical logic is science, and metaphysical logic is morals. Armature evangelists are not civil engineers. To give the preacher a little respect, it's better not to come to church with your graphing calculator and blueprinter's roll, peppering him with calculus questions all through potluck while smiling superciliously and laughing to yourself that as a finished student of physics you know more about the Genesis flood than he does. Don't practice civil engineering on the Sabbath, all that heavy excavation machinery is noisy and the gasoline consumption of them entails spending money. But if you are or have been the victim of a pratty pastor whose abstruse logic is limited to character guesses about God, his adversary, and long dead saints, your worship life will be greatly simplified and caused to be more restful for you if you take the time to differentiate between the absolute logic of gravitational physics (sometimes called noncommutative geometry) and religious jurisprudence.
As a practicing logician, what you need to know about answering your question why is that it is integral to the answers you found for the four primary questions on your square of oppositions. A true syllogism of three lines explains the connections between the four parts of the question from A to E, From E to I, and from I to O, in that order. The train of thought in a true syllogism runs around the square in that order, and if you look at it on the square itself on paper, the reasoning in the true three lines syllogism drawn out on the square looks like the letter Z. If you can form three true statements about your problem in that order, forming an abstract Z, you will have also answered the question why.
Students of logic seeking to complete their understanding of the subject find that the vowels on the square and in its outcomes have meanings of their own. In the helter-skelter world of massive tomes languages, the programming languages found in different hard drives and for different software, yea onto the sixth and seventh generations of the packages, I almost hesitate to call it a code. However, the structure of logic is in code, and this practice illustrates connotatively the true original meaning of the word code. If you have a good teacher in second year logic or go on to study it in a college philosophy course with Greek, the instructor will explain to you that A is for Aristotle, E is for Euclid, I is for Irenaeus, and O is for Ovid, when U who are yourself do logic, and find the Y, which is both a question and a choice for you. If you've ever taken a postsecondary course on "Humanities", you will have found that modernist thought calls this methodology.
It needs to be understood by the aspiring logician that logic on the square of oppositions is symbolic, and that in its symbolic nature, it bears the same relationship to a grammatical argument presented in complete sentences as the cartographer's map does to the terrain it represents. The square of logic is used to prove equalities, and the logical equalities found in sentences about people follow set rules predicated on their axial grammar in the same way that operations on numbers follow set rules. Just as the words "add", "subtract", "multiply" and "divide" always mean exactly the same thing every time they are used, so it is the case that in every grammatically sound sentence which is also complete, a subject modifies a predicate.
One reason for the longstanding dignity of philosophy and for the fact that so many people both admire it and practice it themselves is that there always is a reason. Everything that exists for a reason, and everything at that happens for a reason. Not every human agent or actor is always sober, well meaning, fully educated, or even literate, but in spite of that, everyone who acts, chooses, behaves or speaks does so for a reason. The premier difficulty of a philosopher wondering why a certain person did something is found in the fact that some actors are irrational or sub-par in knowledge, and further that some people hide their reasons. Beyond philosophy, and theology is beyond philosophy, some people who practice less observation in the world around them do seem not in fact to know good from evil. This is often admired in modernist society and is equated with innocence by quite a few people. In spite of the "noble savage" idealism of Rousseau, however, a person in this class can be construed by a well-read Bible scholar or theologian as an argument by counterexample against the Doctrine of the Fall. It is a point of fact that because of the fall, mankind now knows good from evil.
Regarding certain people who at times can seem to blather on endlessly as to "why", often while speaking in circles to their tales and never producing a rhetorically finished complete logical paragraph using genuine grammar, it is worthy of note that in classical philosophy, the original "why" was asked regarding to the apparent angle against the horizon formed by the procession of the equatorial constellations. The question was asked by Thales why the Milky Way band of stars, as it apparently orbits the globe as does the Sun, albeit much more slowly, describes a trajectory arc across the sky which is different in kind and in cadence than the one traversed daily by the Sun.
The first Greek Philosophical "why" asked by Thales about the procession of the equinoxes, is that in fact the Earth tilts on a polar axis of rotation. Also, for geometry fans and excited students whose Trigonometry books are bursting off the shelves, please note that the word "tangent" and the "tangent point" were both created or first used to describe the relationship between the abstractly linear helical risings of the seasonal Zodiac star clusters, and the horizon point over which they rise. This point is stationary (absolute with reference to the procession of the stars) and it also has an absolute antipode, at which the seasonal (lunar month's) rising equatorial constellation sets in the morning at daybreak.
In answer to the preacher who keeps on telling people not to ask why, the most relevant fact of the matter is that logic is both physical and metaphysical. Physical logic is science, and metaphysical logic is morals. Armature evangelists are not civil engineers. To give the preacher a little respect, it's better not to come to church with your graphing calculator and blueprinter's roll, peppering him with calculus questions all through potluck while smiling superciliously and laughing to yourself that as a finished student of physics you know more about the Genesis flood than he does. Don't practice civil engineering on the Sabbath, all that heavy excavation machinery is noisy and the gasoline consumption of them entails spending money. But if you are or have been the victim of a pratty pastor whose abstruse logic is limited to character guesses about God, his adversary, and long dead saints, your worship life will be greatly simplified and caused to be more restful for you if you take the time to differentiate between the absolute logic of gravitational physics (sometimes called noncommutative geometry) and religious jurisprudence.
As a practicing logician, what you need to know about answering your question why is that it is integral to the answers you found for the four primary questions on your square of oppositions. A true syllogism of three lines explains the connections between the four parts of the question from A to E, From E to I, and from I to O, in that order. The train of thought in a true syllogism runs around the square in that order, and if you look at it on the square itself on paper, the reasoning in the true three lines syllogism drawn out on the square looks like the letter Z. If you can form three true statements about your problem in that order, forming an abstract Z, you will have also answered the question why.
Students of logic seeking to complete their understanding of the subject find that the vowels on the square and in its outcomes have meanings of their own. In the helter-skelter world of massive tomes languages, the programming languages found in different hard drives and for different software, yea onto the sixth and seventh generations of the packages, I almost hesitate to call it a code. However, the structure of logic is in code, and this practice illustrates connotatively the true original meaning of the word code. If you have a good teacher in second year logic or go on to study it in a college philosophy course with Greek, the instructor will explain to you that A is for Aristotle, E is for Euclid, I is for Irenaeus, and O is for Ovid, when U who are yourself do logic, and find the Y, which is both a question and a choice for you. If you've ever taken a postsecondary course on "Humanities", you will have found that modernist thought calls this methodology.
It needs to be understood by the aspiring logician that logic on the square of oppositions is symbolic, and that in its symbolic nature, it bears the same relationship to a grammatical argument presented in complete sentences as the cartographer's map does to the terrain it represents. The square of logic is used to prove equalities, and the logical equalities found in sentences about people follow set rules predicated on their axial grammar in the same way that operations on numbers follow set rules. Just as the words "add", "subtract", "multiply" and "divide" always mean exactly the same thing every time they are used, so it is the case that in every grammatically sound sentence which is also complete, a subject modifies a predicate.
One reason for the longstanding dignity of philosophy and for the fact that so many people both admire it and practice it themselves is that there always is a reason. Everything that exists for a reason, and everything at that happens for a reason. Not every human agent or actor is always sober, well meaning, fully educated, or even literate, but in spite of that, everyone who acts, chooses, behaves or speaks does so for a reason. The premier difficulty of a philosopher wondering why a certain person did something is found in the fact that some actors are irrational or sub-par in knowledge, and further that some people hide their reasons. Beyond philosophy, and theology is beyond philosophy, some people who practice less observation in the world around them do seem not in fact to know good from evil. This is often admired in modernist society and is equated with innocence by quite a few people. In spite of the "noble savage" idealism of Rousseau, however, a person in this class can be construed by a well-read Bible scholar or theologian as an argument by counterexample against the Doctrine of the Fall. It is a point of fact that because of the fall, mankind now knows good from evil.