Logical argument, untrue conclusions

THE EDITOR: It is unfortunate that the vast majority of critical decision-makers and decision-influencers in our society - the educated, business-people, and politicians, believe that their appreciation and practice of reasoning (or thinking) is sound, and that the conclusions from that reasoning are necessarily correct, when this is typically not the case. We erroneously believe that logical thinking is the same as correct thinking. Correct thinking results in correct conclusions, but logical thinking need not yield correct conclusions. Is correct thinking the same as critical thinking, to which recently much attention has been generated locally? Correct thinking is the result of applying critical thinking to itself. Correct thinking is presupposition-less thinking.

At no other time in the Caribbean’s history thus far has correct thinking been more needed, given the complexity of the challenges that require immediate effective solution plans — crime, education, identity, etc. This situation has arisen because we are an illiterate people. Even our educated, who may be technically literate, lack key knowledge that is fairly commonplace among the decision-makers in other regions of the world, so how are we to understand them. But the luxury of our irrelevance internationally, the root cause of this situation, is now a thing of the past, which defines the emerging Caribbean crisis. It is a crisis since we will be swept away if we do not bridge the gap quickly. The front-line of this suffering, this war, is getting closer to each individual and stresses are building up everywhere, and in our children.

A stream of reasoning can be perfectly logical yet the conclusions are incorrect.  This is the typical status of the output of all writers in the local newspapers that this author has read whose subject matter involves the fields of the natural or social sciences, though with greater and lesser degrees of incorrectness. How can an argument be logical yet the conclusions untrue? Two kinds of errors separate merely logical thinking from correct thinking — implicit assumptions that are untrue, and inappropriate methodology. This is the key difference.  Recognition of the former and more difficult error is responsible for the formation of the three ways of thinking that are presently at the root of all contemporary ideas hence policy development in the western world — foundationalism, hermenutics, and onto-phenomenology. If these, not the fancy words but their ideas or meanings, do not become common knowledge among our decision-makers and influencers within the next ten or so years, our difficulties will be much more than they are today. 

The second type of error — inappropriate methodology, especially in scientific thinking, is usually not made by experts since it is part of their field. Yet our local writers, mostly not professional scientists, are so enamoured of scientific thinking but lacking the appropriate thinking skills, routinely produce arguments that are claimed to be scientific but are not. Such argument is actually rhetoric hence emotivism, and says more about the writer than anything else.  The most common mistake is the misunderstanding of science itself. Science, by definition, deals almost entirely with the generation, testing, and perpetual refinement of hypotheses, not facts. Within the context of the truth about our world, the conclusions of scientific investigation, to cite Karl Popper, are hypotheses and not facts.  Scientific reasoning, because it is inductive, cannot prove anything but can only disprove, only provide indirect information by falsification.  Science as a knowledge-provider has almost zero ability to provide any privileged knowledge about what the world is.

“Almost” because in very rare instances, usually by accident, it is possible to properly observe something about the world via scientific investigation, which because it is not a hypothesis or stream of reasoning, but an observation, is a fact. But even this can be criticised as interpretation, as the hermenuticists will not hesitate to tell us. It is also the case that for every opinion stated by a scientist, you can quote another equally competent and respected scientist who totally disagrees. As mentioned previously, the other type of error that is responsible for incorrect thinking is the making of problematic “implicit” assumptions. The explicit assumptions are usually checked by any competent thinker as part of proper reasoning practice, but this has become insufficient for the solution of the types of problems we now have because solving these problems require self-knowledge. Success depends on the ability to weed out the implicit assumptions, and how to cultivate this skill is not common knowledge locally.

The problems that we have locally (and globally) are problems of individual behaviour which leads to the question of the self. When logical but incorrect thinking is applied to the question of “what am I?”, the conclusion is that I am a machine, a biochemical computer. This is the prevailing view of foundationalism or scientism — the view of most decision-makers and influencers. It is based on the arbitrary splitting of a person into mind and world at the start of science as we know it, the Enlightenment Era. This splitting process moved into the social sphere hence the conflict, and no unity, no “good behaviour” can come from it. But when correct thinking is applied to the question, as has been done in the West by such as Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Derrida, the word “I” takes on a different meaning.  Correct analysis reveals that the reality of a person is beyond the two-ness or duality of mind and world. This has even been recently observed in science. If a statement is required (which is technically risky since to say “A” is to simultaneously posit “not-A”), then the reality of a person is existence, not existence as a body or mind, but just existence.

Any perception of otherness is illusion, just like the fact that the perception of water on the road is a mirage. “I” and “Other” are arbitrary normative references that have been misapplied to the issue of self-understanding. The illusion is maintained by the incorrect thinking of foundationalism. This knowledge of the self as “existence” obviously opens a space for the possibility of unity since there is no boundary within existence. We urgently need to become familiar with the details of the reasoning employed by Derrida and others of similar ilk — the dynamics of correct thinking.

RICHARD CLARKE
Lecturer, UWI