The Meaning of our 'Answers' are problems for 'Critical Thinking'

Do you understand The Grammar of Liberty?

In the previous two posts (here and here) I noted how much we've lost with those stories and histories of The West that we're no longer learning from today. And whether it's the case that we're only not reading & studying them, or worse, that we're reading them through a post-modernist 'lens' that is fundamentally opposed to what makes The West in general and America in particular so much better than the rest, either way their meaning is being lost to us, and that is what's leaving us blind to the very real monsters that we're facing in the world today.

That means that recovering the canon of the Greco-Roman-Judeo/Christian West's stories and histories, involves more than just reading those works, it involves being mindful that those works represent an approach to reality which understands that:

Real meaning is only found through recognizing what is real and true.

IOW: how you go about your reading, matters as much or more than what you're reading - how else could you be expected to recognize the many errors, and even evils (hello Rousseau!), that are present in the canon, and understand how to avoid swallowing and repeating them? Recovering the Western mind, rather than simply repeating its sometimes fashionable 'answers', requires developing its essential approach to reasoning about reality (which, despite appearances, is the same reality that our Founders faced) in the pursuit of wisdom, and that involves seeking to understand what is (Metaphysics), what that leads to and what follows from it (Causality & Logic), and what, if anything, should or should not be done about what it is that you do come to understand about aspects of the real world that you live within (Ethics).

If you're one of those who recognizes the problems surrounding what we no longer know or understand, and are wondering what to do about it, I hope you're not also one of those who complains when told what the solution to that is:

Open those books and begin remedying your own lack of familiarity with the canon.

And yet, because I've had experience with delivering this message over the years, I won't be surprised when those hearing this advice for the first time (first time? Really?), that many of you (not you, of course) will be thinking (or shouting):

"But Van, it'll take time to read those books!"

Yes, you are correct. It will take time and some effort on your part, to learn some measure of what you should have been taught to understand all along.

And?

Are you waiting for the Answer Fairy to leave some solutions under your pillow? Or to have A.I. 'somehow' do that for you? Do you imagine that you can 'fix' others, without 'fixing' yourself? That must be some mote you see in another's eye, if it's stopping you from seeing that this is exactly the sort of response that the Hydra's 'somehow' knows it can expect as "... an expression of the American mind..." from most people schooled in America today. Go figure.

I do, of course, get the aggravation behind the response, though. When I began this series of posts, I naively thought that I could just expose the central issues required to cauterize the stumps and approach the 'final boss' (which I'll finally name in the course of this post, and identify and dig further into it throughout this series of posts). Nevertheless, it's taken me five years of going through the history of 'Education Reform' in America (again), the equally forgotten (discarded) nature of Metaphysics, and what Epistemology is not (but should be), and the false & subversive ideology of 'Economic Thinking' (which is not philosophy or a substitute for one).

It turns out it takes time to get something done. Go figure. Recognize that evading this is just indulging in more of the wishful thinking we've all been filled up with since pre-school. Deal with it, and get on with the doing of it!

If you still resist doing so, is it because you don't realize that recovering some measure of those works, along with the deliberate intention of seeking to understand what is real and true, may be able to do for you some measure of what it did for our Founders in their era? If you don't think it can... why? If you do, but would rather use your time doing something else... what and why?

Or do you 'somehow' think that human beings in our modern world are so very different from those of our Founders' era? Do you imagine that their powdered wigs & horse drawn carriages somehow made them different from (or better than?) you? Or that having technology 'somehow' makes you different from (or better than?) them?

What seems more likely to you, that having electric lights means that we don't need to know what they understood to be necessary for living lives worth living and in liberty with others, or that something about our having electric lights has 'somehow' blinded us to the dangers of our own ignorance?

You should blink and take a moment. Then refocus, and think.

The only real difference between them then, and us now, is our respective familiarity with the canon, along with approaching it with the intention of gaining a better understanding of what is real and true and right to do, and doing so with a clear awareness that there are consequences to ignoring reality. The real difference between them then, and us now, is that our electrified society eases our thinking that we can 'somehow' get away with ignoring reality, in a way that wasn't possible with the hostile wilderness they faced.

If you want to do something to help restore The West, what is it that you imagine you could do that'd be better and more effective, than beginning to restore it within yourself first? If you doubt the value or effectiveness of doing so... do you not understand what that 'answer' means for the very issue you've admitted to recognizing?

Becoming familiar with the stories and histories that shaped their thinking, and the habits they practiced in thinking about them, will provide you with some measure of what led Thomas Jefferson to describe the Declaration of Independence, as being: "... an expression of the American mind...". Conversely, failing to adhere to a habit of reasoning that seeks to understand what is real and true, and lacking the canon which develops that habit, leads into the muddled state of mind that the Hydra's provocations are meant to distract us into, and 'Critical Thinking' plays a significant role in which mode it is that prevails for our students, and for the rest of us today, though... perhaps not in the way you might assume.

And again, No: getting 'answers' from your targeted research and LLM prompts will not provide you with the understanding that you should have, or save you much if any time in learning what you need to learn. What either is most likely to do, is to fill you with still more meaningless 'answers' that you'll be drawn into bandying about with the opposing groups from the Ideological Observatory, as both of you help the ideologs to spread their ideological churn further far and wide.

Don't do that. Learn something from history, instead. Stop complaining and start reading what you've missed out on.

• Questions that lead to Metaphysics, Causality, and the Logic of Ethics
• How the failings of our public schools trace back to our Founders
• How to step out of the Wizard's Circle of Economics, and return to Classical American Liberalism

And as you go about doing what you know you need to do, keep in mind that the point of engaging in this kind of learning is less about fetching items from a shopping list of The Bible, Homer, the Greek Tragedians, Herodotus, Aesops... Dante... Shakespeare, as if to acquire new possessions, merit badges, and support ribbons for displaying on social media, than to continuously learn more about what is, what follows, and how their integration enables us to better recognize the universal concepts and principles involved in better understanding what you know, and what should be done about that (and don't neglect your Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Thomas Reid, who'll help you with getting more meaning and understanding out of those stories, and within your life).

The good news is that you don't need to 'know it all' (and you should know that you never will), and neither do you have to memorize long lists of facts and answers.

What really needs to be done, is what so many are avoiding: Doing the reading, and actively focusing on how to approach an issue, which is what enables a person to generate a sufficient force and heat of understanding that's needed to both sever and cauterize the hydra's many headed lies into lifeless stumps, and to understand that then, and only then, can it be safe to move on to attack the next provocation that's being waved in their face.

The Pro-Regressive doesn't want you to develop those habits - and they need for you to think that simply reacting, is a 'good idea'.

With that in mind, keep in mind that Pro-Regressive's (Left and Right) always utilize ambiguous terms in order to benefit from the shallow and premature conclusions which they know that you will assume they mean by their words (such as 'Left' and 'Right'), while unbeknownst to you, the inner-circle of TWKB (Those Who Know Best) have freighted them with misleading content and meaning which directly contradicts what you assume is meant by them.

Key Tools of Semantic Deception:
Paltering (n.) The act of using truthful statements to mislead or deceive, often by omitting key details or presenting facts so as to create a false impression.

Polysemy (n.) The coexistence of multiple meanings for a single word or phrase, where the meanings are related but distinct, often arising from a common origin or usage over time.

Equivocation (n.) The use of ambiguous language or expressions to mislead or avoid commitment to a clear statement, often by exploiting multiple meanings of a word or phrase to obscure the truth.

As we'll see in this series of posts, these tactics are nothing new, they come from the age-old art of Sophistry, which concentrates upon generating an 'everybody knows!' mask of unquestioned narratives which seem to have substance, and turns your attention away from looking beneath the surface for further arguments or deeper meaning. The sophist waves the flag of 'Only fools & fascists doubt ___!' to divert the rest of their audience into fighting against a slew of superficial labels in one rhetorical dead-end alley after another, while the revolution advances on around them and acquires ever more monstrous forms.

To be able to identify and expose the central neck of the many-headed hydra, requires our not treating what isn't real, as if it were real - that's what their illusions rest upon. That requires your being in the habit of expecting that the meaning of something, must mean that something is and can be understood to be true, something whose essentials are identifiable, and which integrate into the rest of what you know - before and after - without contradiction, and is not simply a floating 'fact' that is copy & pasted widely as the 'answer' whenever prompted.

What I mean by that, is that what seems sensible on the surface, may not have any real meaning in it. For instance, take the original syllogism:

Socrates is a man,
All men are mortal,
Socrates is a mortal man

, which is logically correct, meaningful, and true, but the fact that on the surface it is syntactically correct (it follows Logic's rules of distributed middle, etc.,), is not what makes this syllogism either meaningful or true. Aristotle's first rule of logic is that before beginning to construct a syllogism, you must first ensure that your premises are true, and that your terms are unambiguous, and only then do you go on to constructing a syllogism to logically demonstrate that.

It is only by understanding that the premise of what a man is ( human beings have a nature that is created to perceive reality and to use its reasoning faculty to guide its chosen actions to accord with what is real and true, and suffers the consequences of failing to do so), and that what the term mortality refers to (a living creature's life will end in death, and that every man, no matter how well they reason out their best laid plans, will someday die), and knowing who it was that the term Socrates refers to (an Athenian man, proven in battle, who thought that an unexamined life was not worth living, and who was put to death in 399 B.C. for publicly questioning his fellow Athenians and testing the meaning of their replies with his Socratic logic), is what makes it possible for the properly structured syllogism to demonstrate that it is both meaningful and true, but if either its premises are untrue or its terms are ambiguous, it doesn't matter how correctly the syllogism is structured, it's 'answer' can't be logically shown to be either or meaningful true.

...from Stephen Coughlin's Unconstrained Analytics

To better see the issue, contrast the 'Socrates is a man' syllogism, with one that is syntactically correct, but whose premises and terms are invalid:

Socrates is a tortoise,
All tortoises fly,
Socrates is a flying tortoise

The premise that all tortoises fly is a false premise that does not reflect what a tortoise is or can do. And while we recognize the name 'Socrates', because it's not being used to refer to the man that we typically assume it does, the term is being used ambiguously. Because the syllogism's premises are untrue, and its terms are ambiguous, it is not logical, meaningful, or true.

I can hear some thinking:

"Another swell story Van, but I'm not worried about what a tortoise can or kant do!"

Try this one on for size:

Healthcare is a human right,
All human rights are inalienable,
Healthcare is an inalienable human right

The absence of Context, often indicates the presence of Pretext

If you're in the habit of ignoring context and accepting answers where 'That makes sense', or what 'everyone knows' is correct, and are not in the habit of checking premises & terms, your agreement with or objection to this, will likely reflect whichever way the current ideological winds are blowing you in, each of which may reflect as little of what is real and true, as the other (See obamacare, or 'replacements' for it, for reference).

Note: you should also beware of those who'd say that something like the Tortoise & Healthcare syllogisms are 'logically correct, but technically untrue' (hi Kant!), for they too are utilizing untrue premises and ambiguous terms, to subvert your understanding of reality through the mis-structuring of logic, so as to escape the restrictions of what is real and true.

With the habit of checking premises & terms firmly in place, then you'll find issues with such 'arguments' jumping out at you, one after the other, such as:

• 'Healthcare' - What is meant by 'health'? Who defines and determines that, you, your doctor, or metrics on a govt regulated insurance form? Similarly for what is meant by 'care', does that mean choosing a service from those offering it, that you think are best able to provide it, or will you have to take what some other entity has determined that you're eligible to receive, according to how you are classified by it?
• 'human right' - a 'human right' is a collectivist term for what might be secured by pressure groups who desire to use political power to force others to act as they wish, and so such inhumane 'rights' are entirely constructed and fully alienable, by majority rule, and/or authoritarian dictate
• An 'Inalienable Right' is derived from what all human beings by nature are, and not from what some or all people yearn for - what is inalienable, cannot be alienated - separated from your nature - anymore than breathing can be made optional.
• I say again: There are no 'human rights' that are inalienable
• 'Individual Right' - is derived from the nature of what all human beings are, not from what some or all people desire . An individual right cannot be alienated from you except by force, such as imprisonment or execution, as penalty for violating the individual rights of others, and such individual rights can only be justly upheld and defended, within a rule of law that is dedicated to, and limited by, an objective respect for them (AKA: Liberty).
• Liberty or a House Slave - Whether your society recognizes 'human rights' or 'individual rights', determines whether you have a choice in your 'healthcare' being provided by those who're interested and competent to offer it, or have no choice in what will be given by those who have been compelled to provide it (AKA: enslaved), and competence will have little or no role in the 'care' you receive, or the 'health' you achieve from it.

Those who peddle 'answers' which have only the surface appearance of being correct, while urging you to accept their statements as 'obviously true!' without your grasping or examining their underlying meaning, are just as likely to 'argue' that you are a heartless fascist for even thinking of questioning what 'everyone knows!', as do both sides of the ideological "Healthcare is a human right!" battle.

Reminder/Hint: They want you to react to their 'answer', they do not want you to take a moment to understand what it supposedly answers, or what an actual answer would actually mean.

The scattershot banalities of 'everyone knows!' that surround phrases in everything from "Healthcare is a human right!" to "Heritage Americans are the only real Americans!", are waved about to lure you into biting on the enticing bait of isolated facts shorn of necessary context, by which they form the Semantic Deceptions needed for disguising their untrue premises and ambiguous terms. It's in that way that our own language is often used to play upon our assumptions, and if we fail to examine the premises & terms being used in the language that we habitually hear and use, then our own thoughts use of them can do grave injury to our understanding of far more than just what is being 'argued' in that moment.

That is and always has been the signature strategy of Sophists through the ages, and in all of their ideological stripes. It is how Pro-Regress is achieved.

Fortunately for us, these monsters, as all monsters do, have a fatal weak spot - they are untrue - which they can't help but hide in plain sight, which is why they live in a constant state of dread of an honest man with the sense and liberty to ask: "What do you mean by ___?". They are painfully aware of the real danger that they would be left facing if we don't take the bait of those distractions that they're busily thrusting into our faces.

Their weak spot is easily spotted, if you look

Whether it occurs on X, or Facebook, or face to face, don't engage with them on the level of their narrative and its deliberate provocations, for to do so is to implicitly accept their false premises. That is what happened during the "Healthcare is a human right!" push for obamacare, which was often advocated for with lines such as "What are you going to do about the 30% who lack health insurance?!", and the typical response from The Right was something like "First of all, it's only about 10%, and these people choose...", without ever realizing that by doing so, they'd implicitly accepted their pro-regressive premises, and effectively conceded the argument, and so could do nothing more than complain as their half of the ideological "Left! Right! Forward March!" cadence helped in marching us on towards our demise.

Stop taking their narratives as presenting either valid or invalid facts (what is obviously wrong, is a key means of drawing you into their ideological churn. AKA: Clickbait). Ignore their provocations and poke beneath the surface by paying less attention to what they've said, and more to what the premises for what they'd said must mean, what they're based upon, and what is likely to follow from, and be built upon, their being accepted.

Start looking at their narratives as a story that's being told to make you assume that they mean what they do not really mean (which typically involves evading a principle that's lethal to their narrative), which is how they sell what 'everyone knows', and inflict such damage by shifting our attention away from what is, to their narrative about it.

Doing this needn't be a complicated process, and doesn't require research projects, or position papers, it only requires you to question their narrative along the conceptual paths that they're evading, "...taking every thought captive..." so as to reveal and identify their unspoken premises & terms:

• When they say 'Black lives matter!', ignore the provocations that some lives matter and others don't, by questioning the premise it evades and denies: 'Why do any lives matter?'
• When they say that "The sexual organs you were born with don't determine your 'gender'!", question the premise they want you to presume is unquestionable, by asking "Then how does faking the appearances of having those sexual organs through costume, makeup, or surgical alteration, determine your 'gender'?"

• When they say 'America is only for Heritage Americans!', bring what they count upon you thinking that they mean, face to face with what they don't want you to realize that they mean, by pointing out the actual meaning of their words: "The motto of The Great Seal of the United States of America, finalized in 1782, is e Pluribus Unum (Out of many, One), and clearly proclaims the 1776 date (MDCCLXXVI) of  the Declaration of Independence and its proposition that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." and so must be treated equally before the law, as the origin of and foundation for the United States of America. That is the meaning and heritage of being an American, so how can rejecting either of those mean anything other than opposition to our American heritage?"

Note that they cannot reply to those questions, without also acknowledging that the false premises and ambiguous terms which they are trying to evade, are the Achilles' heel (another lost story) of their assertions. Ask such questions not to 'own them!', but to turn the discussion away from their narrative, and back towards reality.

Some people (you too?) will say:

"But they'll never engage in conversations like that!"

, and of course that is the kind of conversation that the truly Pro-Regressive (Woke or otherwise) will never engage in - they'll recoil from such questions like Dracula from a mirror, and perhaps for the same reason.

Keep in mind though that most such conversations that you may become engaged in, are not for the (immediate) benefit of the radical you're speaking with (though you never know what time will tell), but for your own understanding, and especially for those who may be silently watching from a distance.

If we fail to demonstrate how to dig deeper into identifying what they're trying to distract us from, that can be as deadly to us, as their failing to distract us from doing so, is to them.

Again, don't react and try to 'own them' - that helps no one but the churning of the Ideological Observatory. The most effective thing you can do is to question their point calmly and cooly, not to get to a different answer, but to bring out a deeper understanding of the issue and their premises, and by doing so, pull them along with you as you pursue identifying what is - and is not - real and true about their 'answer'.

A Critical Language Alert
In short, the alternative to being led around by your ears, is your giving some meaningful thought to what underlies the terms of the narrative that they're attempting to entangle you in.

The best response to a narrative and its provocations, is to think through the meaning and implications of what they've said, and to test whether its assumptions and claims (entailing premises and terms), meaningfully reflect what you can understand to be real and true.

Most people today will feel an almost natural reaction against that - did you feel its tug?

It comes from a particular habit of thinking, and that is what needs to be identified, broken, and replaced with that which I've been describing here, and those who don't do that, will continue to find themselves being carried along on the surface of popular narratives, flopping about as they're skewered with one provocation after another.

The one thing you can be sure of, is that whichever ideological path that this habit of thinking is leading us all down, leads to a very real and inescapably anti-American system being imposed upon us all.

Remember Alinsky's lesson for training up monsters:

The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

The deeper problem with banalities of 'everyone knows!', and our eagerness for easy answers, and our acceptance of shallow 'logic', is that this pattern for arriving at their conclusions, has been repeatedly presented to us as being so sensible, and so obvious, and so alluring for a hundred years, that questioning the design pattern that generates this habit of thinking, doesn't occur to us. Popular opinion recognizes problems all around us, and enthusiastically calls for actions that can only bring still more of the same, and we do so, not because we want more problems, but because we're unaware that how we've been taught to go about our thinking, is the pattern that is furthering the purposes of the Critical Insurrection being waged against us.

What I'm getting at here, is that the thing that's defined our pattern of thinking, whose habits incline us towards seeking 'answers' from everything from narrowly targeted research, to those turning to A.I. for 'answers' as if having those answers is or could be a substitute for understanding the problem, which only then can appropriate solutions be sought for.

The thing that I'm pointing to as being the central head of the modern Hydra...

...the 'Final Boss', is...

...wait for it:

'Critical Thinking'.

No, I'm not recommending more 'Critical Thinking'.

What I am saying, is that in much the same way that 'Social Justice', 'Black Lives Matter!' and 'Heritage American', seek the opposite of what they advertise themselves as being concerned with, 'Critical Thinking' is not the cure for our problematic thinking, 'Critical Thinking' is the problem that has made our thinking so unreasonable.

IOW: The 'Critical Thinking' that we've been putting so much time and effort and money into forcing down our kids' throats as if it were the cure, is the very poison that's been making us all so sick. 'Critical Thinking' is the bad habit we need to be cured of.

The Munchausen Proxy folks in the Intellectual Observatory, have been careful to generate the impression that 'obviously' what 'everybody knows!' is meant by 'Critical Thinking', is that it is a scientifically valid method for thinking through the meaning and implications of what has been said, and for testing whether what you believe is or is not true. Unfortunately, as we'll see in excruciating detail in the coming posts, is that while they do intend to give you that impression, the reality is that the theorists of 'Critical Thinking' make artful use of semantic deception to formulate their materials and curriculum in such a way that they effectively undermine and subvert what every sensible person expects 'Critical Thinking' to mean, and to do for them. And this has been done deliberately, and remarkably openly (for those who bothered to look), for nearly a century.

What I'm pointing to here is not just another Ideology, it is not CRT (Critical Race Theory), or even any of the other 'Critical Theories'; what I'm pointing to is the monstrous many-headed hydra which those writhing necks of CRT, BLM, and 'Heritage Americans', sprout from, each time we attack any of them as if they were the central problem attacking us.

Even as I type this into the internet, I can sense the pushback from many of you against what I've just said (you too? Of course). And that's a good thing.

But it's worth your while to keep in mind another trope of monster stories, which is that the loudest denials of the monster's existence often turn out to be coming from either the monster in disguise, or from those who have been unwittingly aiding and supporting it ("The call is coming from inside the house!"). See our long and tragic history of Education Reform, and our very bipartisan calls for "We need more 'Critical Thinking'!" today.

And so, as we head into the coming posts, I'm not asking you to trust that I have the answers. I'm asking you to consider that you haven't been asking the right questions (such as What is education?).

I'm not asking you to trust what I present to you as new 'answers', I'm asking you to consider what I present, and to satisfy yourself that the premises and terms involved are sound and meaningful (theirs, mine, and yours), while being especially careful about the difference between those facts that you assume to be true ('everybody knows!'), and what you actually know, within the proper context, is real and true, and that you come to understand its meaning.

Towards that end, keep Solzhenitsyn's line from 'Live not by lies' in mind:

...Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me...

, and that:

"...The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world...."

There are few things that are more critically important to a sound mind, than that.

Do that, and then like Hercules & Iolaus, or even the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, you may soon recognize what the old tales told us over and over, that few things burn the lie and its liar more hotly, than having their false pretenses publicly exposed to the truth.

Now all we have to do, is to do that to every last one of the Hydra's heads, and soon we'll be able to bury its body under a tombstone, and consider the immortal beast to be defeated.

For the moment.

Logic: Observing and deactivating the boobytraps of modernity - You keep using that word 3

The previous post reviewed the highlights of Metaphysics and noted that everyone has a philosophy, even if they are unaware of it, and that the only choice open to us is whether yours will be a confused mishmash that'll be of greater benefit to those interested in using you for their own ends, or a sound one that serves what you think is best by respecting what is real and true. The latter option requires practicing what the term 'Epistemology' was coined to mean in the mid-1880s - 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion' - rather than how that '4th branch of philosophy' (which denies that you are able to know what is real and true) is typically thought of and practiced today.

In this post we'll look at that philosophical feature which mankind had been unaware of for most of human history (that we know of), which is that 3,000 year old manmade technology that quickly became the power-tool of the Western mind: Logic (see Aristotle's Organon). For the fact is that while reasoning comes naturally to all men, doing so methodically, and logically, does not, and until men began paying conscious attention to the process of what they did when reasoning, the key tool for doing that more effectively, and for verifying reason's results, remained undiscovered.

Guarding against Fallacies is important, but not enough!

It would be especially hard for anyone interested in Epistemology to treat Logic as a separate and distinct system, as Logic cannot be 'done' without paying due attention to the metaphysics it is derived from, as identifying what is, what is true, what you know, and what follows from that, are the fundamental requirements that must be known before Logic can be used to test an argument's validity. Any exercise in 'logic' which ignores whether the terms or propositions it is built from reflect reality, is a waste of time and intellectual effort, as logically it cannot be interested in Logic. Yes, the rules of Logic's most visible feature, the Syllogism, are used to validate your argument, but that's just a means to an end, the actual point of logic is to detect inconsistencies, errors, and contradictions in your thinking and in what it is you think you are thinking about, and that requires clearly identifying the nature of your terms, noting how one term actually relates to another, and whether or not your premises are in fact true, and support - or invalidate - your argument.

That's why this primary prerequisite for Logic isn't just a formality, it's the whole point of the process:

• Ensure that your terms are clear and unequivocal, and that your premises are true

, and there's no point applying any of the other rules of logic, if you haven't first ensured that your terms and premises are true, as what results cannot be logical.

Disclaimer - I'm no expert on Logic, and I'm not intending to teach it here, but only to point out the too often neglected fundamentals, without which you can have no real ability to be logical. If you are interested in learning Logic properly and fully, I can suggest a comparatively brief, and very readable introduction to logical reasoning, in Peter Kreeft's 'Socratic logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles (the first few pages are excerpted here). In that, Prof. Kreeft points out that the rules of logic are, perhaps surprisingly, rather simple, for instance, concerning the archetypal syllogism:

'Socrates is a man,
all men are mortal,
therefore Socrates is a mortal man'

, he points out the immediate understanding which we should take from that argument:

1. "What are we talking about? "Man"
2. "What are we saying about it?","That man is mortal"
3. "Why is it mortal?", "Because man is an animal, and all animals are mortal, therefore man is mortal."

What may not be immediately obvious in that, is that the form of the syllogism enables us to either relate and order that knowledge into a hierarchy of what we know and how it relates to reality, or it exposes the gaps and breaks and errors in our understanding, both of which enhances and reflects our grasp of Identity, Knowledge, and Causality. How it does so is through the terms, propositions, premises, and the conclusion which they argue towards. What's implicit in the working parts of the syllogism, is that its structure reveals three different aspects of the reality being taken into consideration:

1. Terms reveal essences (What a thing is)
2. Propositions reveal existence (whether it is)
3. Arguments reveal causes (why it is)

Those terms, propositions, premises and arguments, are concerned with the metaphysics of what is, and what causally follows from that, is what Logic exposes, as well as expressing what should and should not follow from that, through Ethics. If you have eyes with which you permit yourself to see, you should be able to see that when Sophists' attack causality, they are indirectly attacking logic, identity, truth, and your ability to understand and respond accordingly to them, as we saw with the relativist's 'my truth' being an attack upon truth and reality as such. It is through the logical process, that we see how our knowledge is consciously validated from the grassroots of reality on up, and extended through to the highest of abstractions formed from them, into solid units of understanding.

Not surprisingly, in the modernist's treatment of logic, as with the supposedly 'mathematically rigorous' symbolic logic (Prof. Kreeft gives an excellent explanation of why that is of little value in reasoning), that fundamental rule is rarely even mentioned, and is more likely ignored or evaded, because modernism fundamentally ignores and evades identity, causality, and existence itself. Play your word games all you want, but don't pretend that dressing such games up in the operational rules of logic could make them any more logical, than dressing a man up in women's clothing would make him a woman.

Elementary my dear Watson
The practice of attempting to 'do logic' by the technical rules while ignoring its overall purpose, often leads to one of the common excuses or *criticisms* of syllogisms, such as: "That just deals with deductive logic!', meaning that it's too simple, and also that deductive logic is somehow more obviously and perceptually *true*, and then that inductive or inferential logic deals with conjectures that we cannot ever be ultimately 'certain' of. Before we open ourselves up to the Inigo Montoya treatment, let's get clear on what the meaning of the words we're using, are:

• Deductive reasoning progresses from general ideas to specific conclusions.
• Inductive reasoning starts with specific observations and forms general conclusions about them.

Ok... so how different is Deductive logic, from Inductive logic? Well, seemingly very different, and yet not so different after all. You see, making inferences isn't as mysterious as modernists would like you to infer, and those who do so would like you to forget (or better yet, never realize) that all deductions, are themselves derived from inferences!

Look again at the classic example of deductive logic:

'Socrates is a man,
all men are mortal,
therefore Socrates is a mortal man'

The three Propositions that the syllogism is made up of, each of which has two terms, and form a premise about reality, with each building upon the previous one, are leading to the argument's conclusion that is and must be true - if it agrees with experience, and that is the key.

To be logical, your basic logical units, the Terms used, and the propositions formed from them, must be clear, and unambiguous, meaning that there can be no doubt about what is being referred to (Identity). The 1st particular concrete term, is identified as belonging to the 2nd general abstract term, and all within the 2nd general term are related to the particular attribute of the 3rd term, forming the conclusion which clearly follows by demonstrating that there is a relationship between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd terms. That integrated meaning causes the conclusions, and not the happenstance of a premise's position in an argument, or the surface rules it abided by, and modernity is fundamentally opposed to that understanding (more on that in coming posts).

One too common example that's given of inductive reasoning today, is this exceedingly poor example which was the very first result I received from a Bing search (from liveScience.com),

"The coin I pulled from the bag is a penny. That coin is a penny. A third coin from the bag is a penny. Therefore, all the coins in the bag are pennies."

What this deliberately gives the impression of, is that induction is just a matter of happenstance and seemingly sensible conjecture of one thing that happens to follow another (Oh, Hello there Hume!), which is unreliable and easily invalidated by any unexpected 'black swan' event, such as the fourth coin coming out of the bag as a nickel - Oops! However the fact is that this is not a valid example of Inductive Reasoning, and is in fact only a hasty generalization (which is itself a logical fallacy - see #3 in '10 Commandments of Logic' pic above).

We can easily come up with a better and more appropriate example of inductive logic practically off the cuff, by looking at how the experience of different particulars, leads to a conclusion that relates to every particular instance, by way of a generalized abstraction of 'mortality':

"It's been observed that man requires food and drink in order to live and that he will die without them. In most climates, men require clothing and shelter to survive, and in too harsh conditions without them, even briefly, whether hot, cold, or excessively wet, will likely cause his death. Like other animals, man is subject to diseases which can cause his death, and man, as with other animals, becomes more frail and subject to disease by aging itself, which also eventually leads to his death. Man is also made vulnerable to death by any number of injuries and wounds that, whether sustained by accident or incident to his person, will cause his death. Seeing that there are numerous means for causing a man's death, and that death will eventually come to him even without obvious external cause, and that not only is there no evidence of any men ever having been impervious to fatality, all of the evidence gathered from every relevant direction, indicates that man cannot escape death, and so we infer that it is part of the identity of man that all men are mortal."

Unlike the exceedingly weak example of the three pennies 'proving' that all coins in the bag are pennies by sequential happenstance, this example looks at what becomes an integrated whole through a variety of ways in which man experiences mortality, and inescapably leads to the conclusion that because of the nature of what we know man to be, we are able to infer that part of his identity is that all men are mortal.

The last words there, of "... all men are mortal", of course are what form the 2nd premise of the classic 'Socrates is...' example of deductive logic, and what you should infer from that, is that all such abstract terms are arrived at through the same inductive manner (soundly or unsoundly), which begin in experience, and rising up by abstraction to become accepted concepts - and inescapably lead to the conclusion that the premises used in Deductive logic, are derived from Inductive reasoning. The terms of a deductive syllogism are the answers at the end result of a process of inductive reasoning that created them, and while it can and does save time, it shouldn't be forgotten that it can and should be used as a means of making more plain any oversights or errors that might've been missed in the more detailed process of inductive reasoning.

To fully appreciate Logic and the benefits it reveals to us, we need to understand the nature of the reciprocal 'fact checking' role that is implicit in the complementary roles of deductive and inductive reasoning, which they'll perform for each other, if attended to diligently, in that - so long as you expect that to the best of your knowledge your premises & terms are true - if your deductions and inferences are technically valid, and yet the inescapable conclusion differs in some way from what experience actually shows, that's an indication that there are gaps or even errors in your assumptions and knowledge of the terms you're reasoning with.

For instance, the following example which abides by only the surface rules of the syllogism:

'Socrates is a Greek,
All Greeks eat olives,
Therefore, Socrates eats olives.'

, leads to a conclusion which does not agree with our experience which indicates that at least one of the premises are not fully sound and true, which should cause you to acknowledge that this argument inescapably 'proves' that something in 'what you know' is false.

Discovering errors in your logical reasoning, by means of logical reasoning, is not a bug, that's a feature, and it means that there's more to learn in what you're thinking about, and it clearly shows you that your premises and possibly even your terms, need to be explored further, qualified, and possibly even entirely revised.

To ensure that our 'logically inescapable' conclusions don't become traps for us, we need to do our best to ensure that every step in our logic, and our understanding of its premises, and that its terms are clear and unambiguous, all fully comport with what is real and true. The rules for arranging terms and premises in a syllogism are an important part of the process of logical reasoning, but they do not substitute for the entire process which they too depend upon. That requires that you incline towards a wider view of your knowledge, and ensure that it is more than an arrangement of 'facts', and that there are good reasons to believe that the soundness of your knowledge, and the terms and premises derived from it, lead to, rather than are constricted by, the technical rules of the syllogism itself. By adhering to the primary rule, before, during, and after, we are able to learn from what we know.

Deductive Logic, and Inductive Logic, are two complementary and interdependent approaches to validating your reasoning, and you can bet that when people criticize logic as being 'too pat', or rationalistic, it's because they've allowed those terms to become divided from each other in their minds. It should come as no surprise that modernity was practically established upon pitting deductive and inductive reasoning against each other, they've a number of methods for confusing you into allowing them to do just that.

This issue came to the forefront with Hume, and then exploded in maximum density with Kant's reaction to him, but it is enough for now to know (we'll get into further details in later posts) that when you see the terms 'analytic vs synthetic', or in their more technically detailed form of 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', in either case you'd be wise to treat them as flashing red warning signs being used to divert you into taking the offramp of their '4th branch of philosophy', which is designed to lead you astray from what is, and what can be understood to be, real and true.

You should know that those lights are flashing red, whenever you see examples such as this:

'A Bachelor is an unmarried man' and 'Grass is green'

, and they're attempting to force you to exit onto modernity's epistemological offramp, through those 'analytic'/'synthetic', or 'a priori'/'a posterori' terms just mentioned, which they assert are only 'true' (scare quoted as this is the means of reducing Truth to small 't' truths') either by definition alone, or through empirical evidence.

Before looking closer, how they typically define these terms are, that Analytic or:

"A priori claims are those you can know independent of experience"

, or is 'contained by it' (as 'unmarried' is 'contained' by 'bachelor') while on the other apparent hand, a Synthetic or:

"a posteriori claims are justified based on experience"

If something about those statements seems unsettling, congratulations, your internal B.S. detector is working well, and you can see the issue by asking 'What is this, How do I know it, What if anything should I do about that', yourself.

We can and should say that, and without advancing a materialist position, it is true that there is nothing that we can know of this world, independent of experience. The word 'Bachelor' was not magicked into our minds from somewhere beyond time or space, we know that a bachelor refers to an unmarried man, and because through experience we know what a man is, and we know what marriage is, and that 'Bachelor' is the word we use to identify a man that is not married - it is self-evident that the word, its terms, and its premise, are all derived from experience.

The same goes for their other favorite examples, that the sum of degrees in a triangle is always 180* is 'true in every universe', because we understand from experience the nature and properties of a triangle. Likewise with Number and numbering, as far from numbers being mysteriously ethereal concepts, they are what we arrived at after having abstracted the particulars being counted - apples, oranges, spears - away from the quantities being handled, we were able to give the names of 'one, two, three' to them, as a means of greatly simplifying the counting of them.

Yes, numbers show up in the darndest of places, but that's because quantities of this and that is all there is... everywhere! No part of 27÷9=3 exists outside of or prior to experience, and in case you've forgotten, learning that the answer to what 27 divided by 9 is, is devilishly difficult to get to - ask any 1st grader to verify that for you. It's only after you've understood what a number is, and what particular numbers refer to, and after you've experienced working through and counting it out a few times, that it gets easier. Yes, numbers, math, can be applied anywhere in place and time, and would apply whether or not people existed... by whichever intelligent creature existed that was able to learn the concept from experience. Don't fall for the 'a priori/a posterori' con, it is purely philosophical sleight of hand, and it is intended to take something from you - one of your most important handles on reality. Whatever example is waved in your face, don't buy into their conceptual Three Card Monty game - concepts are applicable in nearly every scenario we can imagine, but that does not mean that we came to know any of them through any means other than from experience.

Note: In recent years there've been attempts to dodge this, by objecting that "What makes something a priori is not the means by which it came to be first known, but the means by which it can be shown to be true or false" (Baggini), meaning that once it's been learned, we no longer need to refer to experience, to know what a triangle is, to which I give all the respect which is due that argument in my reply: B.S.! Someone who has somehow never seen or heard of a triangle, will not 'know' it by saying the word 'triangle', and until you ask them to imagine the shape made from three straight lines, laid end to end with the last connecting back to the first, they will then understand it, from having had that experience of imagining it, or you can show them a triangle and after having experienced seeing it, they'll recognize it... from that experience.

There are many technical differences between what I've lumped together here as being roughly equivalent between 'analytic vs synthetic', 'a priori' vs 'a posterori', but they are differences of degree, not kind, and the ugly fact is that people are working very hard to discredit your ability to apprehend reality, and they will try to confuse the issue of what is, and is not real, but their efforts are no more worthy of trust than those of the Three Card Monty dealer - don't fall for it. After cutting through all of the dense verbiage, what they're doing is attacking both Identity and Causality, and they're doing so in order to capture your mind - decline to accept their 'hypotheticals' - they're trying to bounce you right on out of the real world. I'd advise against accepting their invitation.

As we've already seen with the premise that 'man is mortal', when we examine our experiences, we don't simply infer a conclusion from a sequence of observations, as the lame example of taking coins from a bag asserted, rather, as we saw with 'man is mortal', we observe that in examining our experiences, when we find that the totality of our observations show the same results, which are also affirmed through all other conceivable variations, we are able to infer with certainty that within those contexts that conclusion is able to be understood to be true.

NOTE: Certainty does not require nor imply inerrant infallibility, and any attempt at claiming that, is also an attack, deliberate or not, upon reality, identity, truth, and everything in your world which depends upon them.

We are able to infer that there is a basis for being certain of our conclusion, within appropriate contexts, and one reason why we should not separate deductive from inferential reasoning, is that they are interdependent and self-correcting, when previously unconsidered evidence and contexts arise.

It's important to point out that the famous 'black swan' event, is not a valid case of inference or exception, relying as it does on nothing more than the feeble 'this coin was a nickel, and the next coin was a nickel, so all coins are nickels' mockery of inference, in that as we know that chemical processes which produce the coloring of a swans feathers, are fully capable of producing other colors, and there's no reason to suspect that a mutation would be unable to produce a single black swan or even a new breed of them. The fact that swans are most likely to be white, is valid as a general rule of thumb, but the existence of one or more black swans does nothing to invalidate inferential reasoning.

With that being said, we can move onto the other evasion of 'synthetic' or 'a posteriori' examples, which are typically positioned through common examples of:

"Grass is green" and "Man is mortal" and "There are no black swans"

, and one of the ways that students are intellectually assaulted with these terms, is by means of hypotheticals - NEVER allow someone to propose violating a fundamental principle such as identity or causality, in order to engage you in a hypothetical that begins with your agreeing to imagine something that conflicts with what you know to be real and true; their purpose is not to expand your thinking, but to puncture it, to sow doubts into your existing thoughts, and to disable your ability to think clearly from then on.

As we've seen, the premises that 'man is mortal' or 'bachelor is an unmarried man', are inferred from experience in just the same manner as 'grass is green' (in most varieties, not all), and the sum of degrees within a triangle is always 180*. It is only from experience that we are able to conceive of and conclude with certainty that all triangles in a flat plane (important point) sum up to 180*, because we can quickly see that there are no possible variations within a flat plane, that could result in more or less that 180* - it isn't possible. And while laying a triangular shape upon a convex or concave surface will produce more or less that 180*, that's no longer dealing with triangles in the context of a flat plane. And we don't validate our concepts through hypotheticals such as 'imagine grass that's red, or striped', because experience shows that hypotheticals that do not exist in reality, are not valid 'points of view' for considering reality from.

That man is mortal, is a result of inference. That all triangles contain 180* is the result of inference. That Red is a color, is a result of inference (and the fact that there are edge colors where its difficult to say are blue or green, does not invalidate either, and the fact that noticing there are fuzzy edges affirms, rather than calls into question, that solid ground can be identified). That a Bachelor is an unmarried man is no less an inference because it is defined to express the difference between men, and married men. Even 2+2=4 is an inference. The fact that some terms and premises take more or fewer instances to reliably infer a conclusion, has no effect on the validity of inference. BTW, the same applies in ethical conclusions, when an argument is made that:

'All people need food and shelter to survive,
some people lack food and shelter,
therefore government should ensure they are fed'

, they are counting upon your accepting their premises - and the ones they are ignoring - without question, and you can bet that they will fight against your checking their premises about 'people', 'need', 'good', and 'government'. Don't allow it. Ever.

The supposed 'ideal' of inerrant and infallible certainty, which they hold up as an ideal, is a confession of their failure to understand and hostility to, mankind and man's means of understanding.

Are you Certain?

Is logical reasoning infallible? Of course not, and neither is it a criticism of either logic or reasoning to point out that both can make errors (ehm... discovered... how?),and seeking after infallibility, is itself an attack upon your ability to know what is real and true. Those who make such points as criticisms of logic and/or reasoning aren't seeking after what is 'right', they mean to suggest that it is possible to be human and inerrant, which is a confession that they seek to escape the burden of judgment, they seek after systems that are so perfect that they won't ever need to risk being in error, and more than anything else, they seek to escape the responsibility of taking their own judgment seriously. Ultimately what that means, is that they seek to escape from reality, and truth, in the comfort of the grandest lie of all, which is but a euphemism to divert attention away from the death and destruction that follow in its wake.

Stay on the road to reality, don't take the detours and offramps. The reason for the rules of logic that Aristotle formulated, and why we should follow them, checking and verifying that your thinking is either valid, or invalid, is to bring clarity to our understanding of what is real and true, and to bring order to our thinking. Logic is less about proving that something is true, than with clarifying whether your ideas of what is true, correspond to what actually is real and true, and reveals to you whether the fault is to be found within your argument, or with your premises, or even the terms, that you're using.

With all of that having been said, and reviewed here, there are a few other notable cautions and root fallacies noted in previous posts, to point out here, as an awareness of them helps in keeping your mind on track:

• An infinite regress does not lead to an explanation (in an evasion of both inductive and deductive logic), and engaging in such an effort is a giveaway that either an error, or a deception, is being concealed ("It's turtles all the way down!")
• The hypothetical assault - when a modernist asks you to consider an unreal or impossible hypothetical - "If we hypothetically, imagine ice that sinks, or grass that floats and burns, then it would it be logical to say...", but they aren't teaching you to think logically, they're actively steering you away from the fundamental rule for logically building upon what is real and true, to send you instead down modernity's epistemological offramp, performing computational rules of flowcharting, rather than engaging in logical reasoning.

All of that and a great deal more (but always at least that), are basic to what was expanded upon in Aristotle's Metaphysics, and what's been known as The Organon, made up of his Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations.

What 'Epistemology' is defined as being, then - though rarely practiced as such - a system that 'distinguishes justified belief from opinion', is only able to see that it's justified, because it first identifies what is real and true, and so can be argued for logically, and be ethically justified.

That process is, and was, and should again be, understood to be one that utilizes metaphysics, logic, and ethics, in identifying what is, what follows, and what, if anything, should be done about that, by examining claims in a methodical, reasonable, and logical manner... and the Ethical portion of how we go about determining 'what, if anything, should be done about that', is what we'll look at next.

Schools are closed: Why undo the only bright spot in 2020? - Education or School Systems pt 1

Back to school time? Really?! Don't get me wrong, there are few things more important to our lives and society than getting a good education, and conversely, few things that are more harmful to our lives and society than having a bad education. Yes... there's a 'but' coming, but it has nothing to do with the Coronavirus/Covid19, lockdowns or masks, and everything to do with an abundance of evidence that our school systems, even by their own criteria, have been producing progressively more students who are badly educated, in both rich & poor schools across the nation, and are doing so despite ever expanding systems and rising funding for them. What this indicates is that this issue is not solely a fault of particular parties, administrators, programs, teachers or parents, but is something that is systemic to our school systems as a whole - and that's traceable back to an error we made over a century ago. Mindful that people 'are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable' and will ignore such facts and their consequences for as long as they are able to, I hereby declare my unpopular opinion:

Schools being closed has been the best & brightest spot of 2020 - why on earth would you want to reverse that?

If my opinion shocks you more than the facts that gave rise to it, it seems to me that should shock you about yourself even more, for given the importance of an education, isn't it foolish to expect good education to come from an inherently bad educational system, and even worse to persist in ignoring and promoting it? Whatever feelings you may have on the matter, I strongly suggest that you take this time to give careful consideration to the nature of our nation's school systems, and to whether or not they are fit to send either students or teachers back into, and why.

Assuming that what you mean by Education, is something more than getting a 'skilz certificate' for the job market, what's more important to a good education than test grades, is that it conveys an essential body of knowledge and general understanding which aims that student towards living a life worth living, and equips them with the intellectual means for living it well (does your school do that? These closures have seen alternatives to private and home school springing up across the nation and perhaps involving teachers you already know and trust in the form of Micro-Schools, and more, which can do that). A bad education, OTOH, requires only that students be led to misidentify a handful of good ideas as being inconsequential or even bad, or that bad ideas be misidentified as being good, to aim them towards preferences which conflict with or contradict important general truths. Do only that, and no matter how many good grades, test scores and degrees they get, the arrow of those student's lives will, over time, veer further and further from their proper target (does your school (hello '1619 Project', Common Core, etc...) do that?).

Of course I recognize that the unexpected closure of our school systems is without doubt posing a great disturbance and inconvenience to most, yet it's nevertheless a rare and great opportunity to correct the mistaken experiment that We The People instituted into our school systems over a century ago, and as the opportunities to correct errors such as that are so very rare, we should take advantage of it now, while the current crop of experimenter's ambitions are surprisingly (and temporarily) aligned with our own best interests - keep our students and teachers out of the schools!

The mistake I'm referring to here, was a spectacularly costly one we made in altering the nature of our school systems at the opening of the 20th Century. The fact that we chose to do so - with the very best of intentions - doesn't alter the fact that what we chose, has subjected generations of our students to an unwise experiment; one which the Pied Piper of Progressivism, John Dewey, termed an experiment in a more 'progressive education',

"...The school is often called an experimental school, and in one sense that is the proper name. I do not like to use it too much, for fear parents will think we are experimenting upon the children, and that they naturally object to. But it is an experimental school—at least I hope so—with reference to education and educational problems...."

, and the high school and college graduates and in many cases even teachers, who are currently burning up our cities and tearing down our statues, should be evidence enough that the experiment has gone horribly wrong, and so we should take this opportunity to end it and, repeat after me: keep the schools closed!

Though those particular effects may have been unintended, what Dewey and his fellow 'Progressives' (and he was only the most recognizable face of a large movement) intended their experiment to accomplish, was - flowery language and aspirations aside - to de-emphasize (read: progressively phase out) the methods, memories, habits and ideals that Western Civilization in general, and America in particular had developed from, from the minds of those currently living in that same civilization and under its finest system of government. Well, in case you're curious, what a person is like once they've