I google’d it but couldn’t find anything except “criticism of pure reason”.
I’d like to make fun of or rather read the criticism/mockery of logic/sense.
How could one attack an argument formed by sense, logic, reason?
Do you know any research or essay on this?
How would you, as a SDMB user, criticize them?
When humans argue about something, they most usually form sentences, and sentences have to make sense. You cannot speak or write by re-positioning verb, object or subject. Otherwise you won’t be understood. But you can push the semantical limits of each of the words in the sentence in order to attack the argument or the ideas of the person (with whom you are arguing)
But I do not want this. I want to be successful in arguing by destroying the whole idea of logic/reason/meaning/sense.
Deductive logic is self-contained… if the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true. So if you want to attack someone’s use of deductive logic, you have to attack their premises. You can argue that people pick their premises in order to arrive at the conclusion they want to arrive at. As Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational animal – he is a rationalizing animal.”
A good place to start is by examining the relationship between logic and the world.
Logic is a self-contained mathematical system. Within this self-contained system there is a clear definition of truth.
But when we use logic to prove things about the world we are making an assumption that this self-contained mathematical system maps onto reality in a consistent and meaningful way. Now, it appears that this assumption is well-founded, since the use of logic always seems to generate accurate predictions about the unfolding of the real world. But we cannot be sure that this relation holds true in all cases. In other words, we know that logic is logical because it is defined so. We do not know that the world is logical, only that it seems to be so from repeated observation.
Wait, I’m not sure I follow. Does the OP want to win arguments by attacking the whole idea and application of logic, or just the logic of whom he’s arguing with?
I think you need a better understanding of what logic is. Get a copy of Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Dodgeson’s) Symbolic Logic, or read it here, at Project Gutenberg.
You are using the word logic informally, I think, and not the way a logician would, and so nothing you read on logic is going to help you argue. You need to be able to recognize faulty logic, which this book will help you (immensely) to be able to do; then you can attack someone’s logic, if it is faulty. If it is not, you will have to attack the premise with facts (cite them). If you cannot attack the logic, nor the premise, you will have to rethink whether or not you want to argue with someone.
Attacking the premise is what you are doing when you argue with anti-abortionists who claim abortion is murder. If a fetus/embryo/blastocyst is a citizen with all the rights of citizenry, then abortion is murder. You cannot attack the conclusion that abortion is murder without addressing the premise that a fetus/embryo/blastocyst* has civil rights.
I hope that example does not derail the thread, but if it does, please label the arguments you are using, so the OP can see them at work.
*We really need a name for this besides something like “unborn baby,” which adopts anti-choice terminology, or “products of conception,” which is a post-abortive term. Have I missed something?
What kind of logic are you going to use to criticize logic?
If you could use logic to show that logic is inconsistent, you’d have a winner. However, whenever we encounter a logic system with that property, we drop it as inconsistent and therefore uninteresting.
(Of course, given any sufficiently powerful system like number theory, and given the axiom of choice, we can prove ala Goedel’s incompleteness theorem that it’s either incomplete or inconsistent. We tend to assume it’s incomplete rather than inconsistent.)
In order to attach logic, you have to pick a logic system you’re attacking. There are a number of formal ones. Aristotle’s syllogisms can be formalized, and we can show that it’s an inadequate system: because it doesn’t treat existence specially, you can use it to “prove” stuff that’s clearly not true. Add “predicates” and you get a logical system that’s useful. [wikipedia cite] So, you could easily attack syllogistic logic, which most people who’ve never studied formal logic think is equivalent to logic, and you’d seem successful, but only due to the ignorance of your audience.
Of course, the other approach is solipsism, which has really been done to death, and folks who use solipsistic arguments tend to be ignored. But if you want to see how people have tried to destroy rational thought as a useful tool, google it.
In an important way, the solipsists are right. There’s no way we can positively know anything about the real world, as in everything could be a dream. The only things we can actually know are the fact that the thinker exists, and subjective statements about that existence (we can say “I feel pain” with absolute certainty, but we can’t say “I got stung by a bee” with the same certainty because bees and any objective reality might not exist.)
Go ahead and try solipsism and see the laughter you get. Modern thinkers know we need to take some things as axiomatic in order to talk about the real world, and few people are interested in really challenging those axioms. Those few who do aren’t likely to be ones who want to give up on logic wholesale.
Note that what I say agrees 100% with RivkahChaya’s post above: solipsism attacks the premises, not the logic or the conclusions. (If I understand it correctly – maybe some forms of it do attack logic, but they’d be left without a leg to stand on.)
Consider, however,Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems (to quote Wiki): The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.
In seriousness, look up the surrealist movement. It’s outright based on the idea that dream logic is “superior” to the logic of the waking world. It may be the case that nowadays we just see art, but many surrealists truly believed their works to primarily be works of philosophy and the art being a side effect.
Embracing this philosophy will, unfortunately, not make you a rocket scientists nor president.
