Think About It. Logic. “What were you thinking?” That’s what my mother asked more than once when I was eight years old. Later I learned my form of reasoning had been labeled deduction nearly 3000 years ago. It seemed to me that if I simply held Alexander’s tail, I shouldn’t be punished if our family cat did the pulling. I was wrong, and my red posterior proved it. That would not be the last time my young logic failed me. Later I would face other fallacies in the use of otherwise seemingly sound reasoning. Sometimes even Aristotle can’t defend you. That goes for Plato and Socrates as well.
To this day, the logic of logic occasionally confuses me. With time on their hands, some early thinkers in India, China and Persia pondered organizing ideas in a formal way. In the so-called Western World, this study of meanings of reality, existence, mind and reason was nurtured in Greece. This “love of wisdom”, Philosophy, required a departure from casual speech to a reliance on rational argument. It needed agreement on terms, but got precious little.
Seems the name adopted for my way of think was abductive reasoning, only requiring an inference to take you from observation to a hypothesis that recognizes reliable data and permits a relevant conclusion. Noticing if I obeyed my parents I didn’t get spanked gave me a false sense of security. That’s why a prominent 19th century American philosopher had called it guessing. Actually it is akin to the more respected inductive reasoning, hopefully using more careful scrutiny. However you never have more than a degree of probability, not a certainty.
Without knowing it, I suppose I had opted for deductive reasoning, the favorite of Aristotle as described by Plato. Here, an inference is valid only if there is no possible result when all the premises are true but the conclusion is false. Had I been satisfied that I could personally know I did not pull the pet’s tail, I would have been fine. My logical conclusion was that I would not be punished. Keep in mind, Galileo. He joined many philosophers of the 1600s in following Aristotle’s strongly held belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe. An Inquisition found his ideas “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” His “house arrest” is thought to have contributed to his death.
Now comes the Fuller Brush Man with ladies hosted by my mother. Her coveted gift was a hair brush well “sold” as made of unbreakable material. The resident boy-child tested it on the kitchen pump’s iron handle. The government has since required the label to read “break resistant”. Too late. While my conclusion had made perfect sense to me, my tender bottom could tell from the bristles on the business half of the brush that my mother had once again failed to agree with my Logic. Think About It.