An analytic philosopher sits down in a bar and asks for a coffee with no cream. The waitress
says, "I'm sorry, but we're out of cream, how about with no milk?"
All right! Pick a card. No, it's OK, I'm not looking, pick a card, just point to one on your screen.
Okay, now, I'm going to find the card that you picked and remove it. Are you ready? BAM.
Pretty amazing, right? Only the thing is, this second set of cards is completely different
from the first set that I showed you. I didn't actually find your specific card, I just told
you a nice story and let you think that what I did was impressive, even though, if you
were paying close enough attention, you'd know that it wasn't.
Logical fallacies and many of the other errors we make in thought function on pretty much
the same principle: they let us mistake something that sounds rational for something that is
rational.
Part of the problem is that we tend to think in language, and language is really sloppy.
Like if I say "the right to bear arms," you don't know if I mean the right to carry a
gun or the right to carry a severed limb, or the right to have the limbs of a bear.
Also, unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing that prevents somebody from creating a sentence
that seem like it says something but, in actuality, doesn't
mean anything.
I can say "The bachelor went to the store for his wife," or "this water doesn't have
any hydrogen in it," or even "this sentence is false."
Those aren't even lies, they just don't mean anything. And they don't sound any different
from sentences that do.
So how are we supposed to know if an idea actually makes sense, or just sounds like
it does, like in a logical fallacy?
That's actually a really tough question to answer. Aristotle wrote about formal logic
almost 2300 years ago to provide some sort of a guide to interpreting the validity of
certain statements, but it was still fundamentally based on interpreting language, and so it
was only so effective.
But around the start of the 20th century, almost two millennia after Aristotle wrote
about logic for the first time, some mathematicians decided that they'd had enough of
people just wandering around & saying stuff.
They began examining and defining the structure of thought under language, to try and wrestle
it into a format of precise analysis that was, well, more objective and mathematical.
That was a huge deal, a truly momentous event in the history of human thought. Before these
guys showed up, you had to depend on a sort of intuitive sense of whether or not sentences
sounded like they followed logically from each other.
But their work uncoupled logic and thought from language so we could step back and look
at the shape of what was being said independent of the contents, which
made verifying whether or not a logical argument was valid as easy and mechanical as punching
numbers on a calculator.
Gottleb Frege kicked this whole revolution off just
trying to put mathematics on a firmer logical footing, but in the process, he recognized
that he had developed a useful way for talking about logic generally.
He invented a method for writing ideas as sequences of logical symbols, including a
radical new method for referencing individuals as parts of sets that was actually more specific
than language could ever be.
Like you can write sentences using these symbols that would be vague and confusing
if you tried to say them in English, and also just look at them and know whether or not
they're logically valid at a glance. Something like this would have knocked Aristotle right
out of his toga.
Frege's work inspired philosopher-mathematicians Bertrand Russell and his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who was a total genius, but only has, like, three pictures of him, and only one where
he's smiling.
Wittgenstein's first book of philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was intended
as a line in the sand separating sense from nonsense.
He basically said that, if someone made a statement that was neither a testable, empirical
claim about the world, like "that cat is on the mat," or a relationship
between word definitions, like "a cat is a domesticated feline ," then that person was
just speaking nonsense, and really shouldn't be saying anything.
He also explicitly called out philosophers of the past for what he viewed as a sort of
vague word-masturbation, saying that they had written whole books about opaque concepts,
which, if defined properly, wouldn't have been debatable at all. Ouch.
That's pretty bold, but despite being confrontational, Wittgenstein's work, as well as the work of
his colleagues, really changed the world.
Today, analytic philosophy, the science of discovering and evaluating the structure of
thought under language, has become the most practiced type of academic
philosophy in the world.
But it's not just about logical symbols and truth tables... and it's not just for academic
philosophers, either. Analytic philosophy is more of an attitude
than anything, and I think that it's really useful for just about anyone.
We sometimes play loose with language and depend on other people to fill in the gaps
in what we say for themselves. We'll sort of wave our hands and gesture broadly in the
general direction of vague notions or supposed links in our chains of thought that we're
too busy or too lazy to flesh out all the way.
But if we don't rigorously, mercilessly check that every single segment of that chain is
impossible to disconnect from the ones that came before
it, or define exactly what it is that we're talking about, it becomes really easy to skip
over something important because it sounds reasonable and in the process, make
huge errors in reasoning.
"Of course free will exists. I could go back in time to this morning and choose to have
something different for breakfast."
Wwwellll would you be going back in time knowing what you had for breakfast and wanting to
change it? Would that prove anything? How exactly are you going back in time?
Oh come on, don't be like that, you know what I meant.
No, I don't. And it's entirely possible that you don't either.
That's not just nitpicking, or if it is, it's nitpicking that's absolutely essential for
having a meaningful discussion instead of just throwing random words at each other.
Human beings knew about logic for thousands of years before people really embraced the
fact that it's only really useful if it's bound tightly to ideas, a process which requires
defining those ideas rigorously, with a precision that many don't practice.
But analytic philosophy and rigor have really changed the face of human thought. Of course,
now that you know about it, it may be a little harder to appreciate dumb magic tricks.
Pick a card. Look, I took it away. Not so magical now, is it?
Have you ever realized that you never actually understood how to connect two links in your
chain of thought, when you looked close enough? I certainly have. Please, leave a comment
below, and let me know what you THUNK.
Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah-blah-subscribe-blah-share, and I'll
see you next week.