POD Modular Reflection

Josiah Tham(28)

3.18 Nathan

The idea of reason and reasoning has been around for countless centuries, even since the most ancient of civilizations. It has been a constant in a plethora of civilizations and cultures and is an important foundation of our everyday lives. Without reasoning, how would we know that we actually exist? How would we know how to differentiate between different items such as fishes and whales? This shall be discussed later in the essay.

What exactly is logic? Logic is the study of human reasoning or argumentation. Aristotle was the founder of formal logic and is widely regarded as an important founding father of logic. They key philosophy behind Aristotle’s logic is depicted in a type of reasoning we know as syllogism. The most famous example of syllogism is as follows.

All men are mortals.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

The first two sentences are the premises of this example of syllogism. Simply put, assumptions made. The last sentence however, is the conclusion. The two can be differentiated through the structure of the sentences. Firstly, the conclusion is always last and has the word ‘therefore’ in front of it. However, how do we know that the argument is valid or correct? Validity is used. For an argument to be deemed valid, the conclusion must follow from the premises. Thus no matter how silly an argument may sound or even if its premises are false, it may still be valid. However, even if an argument’s premises are true, it is still possible for that argument to be invalid as the conclusion may not follow from the premises. An example is this:

Vegans do not eat pork chops.

Dave does not eat pork chops.

Therefore Dave is a vegan.

This argument is invalid as while Dave might not eat pork chops, it does not mean that he does not eat other meats such as chicken or mutton as he might be a Muslim or allergic to pork. Therefore the argument is deemed invalid. However, if an argument’s premises are true and it is also valid, then such arguments are sound.

A close relative of syllogism is fallacies. A fallacy is a loophole or error in a piece of reasoning or an argument. However, these errors are not easy to spot and it is important to be able to. This is as they are very common and are deceivingly persuasive. An example of a type of fallacy is a false dilemma. False dilemmas appear valid as their structure is similar to a disjunctive syllogism. Yet they are often fallacious as they offer a statement with no true choices, an example of which is below.

Dad: Either you are stupid or you’d have attained full marks for your test!

Boy: But I only got 99 for my test!

Dad: Therefore you must be stupid!

This argument is obviously false as although the boy did not get full marks, he still attained an extremely high score however his father still deems him to be stupid as he did not achieve a perfect score.

In conclusion, logic is an extremely important part of our daily lives that allows us to differentiate between what is true and what is false. However, logic can be used against us, an example of which is propaganda. Propaganda uses flawed logic and fallacies to twist the views and thinking of people which causes us to do something which the propaganda intended to make them do. Thus it is important to know how to spot the errors in such flawed logics and fallacies. Logic. What will we do without it?