Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Judgement, Understanding, and Arguments Among Friends

"Truth springs from argument among friends." - David Hume

Domenico Fetti - The Parable of the Mote and the Beam
Mr. Hume's aphorism may sound a little crazy to modern ears. These days when you hear the word "argument", it usually means something like "verbal combat." In that sense, arguments are as likely to drive friends apart as to uncover truth. But Hume was no fool, and that's not how he was using the word. He meant it in the philosophical sense: a verbal defense of an idea, in which reasons are given for that idea. An argument has a conclusion, as well as one or more reasons given to support it. A claim without reasons is not an argument. It is, as Ambrose Beirce put it, "a vagrant opinion without visible means of support." Many combat-type arguments are a jumble of insults, ridicule, and vagrant opinions; and they may contain no arguments at all in the philosophical sense. Hume was saying that truth springs not from verbal battle, but from civil discussions involving real, reasoned arguments.

I think he's probably right, although I doubt that even the kinds of argument Hume had in mind lead to truth or agreement very often. What's more common is that they lead to mutual understanding. The debaters may not end up agreeing with each other, but at least they learn more about the other person's reasons for thinking the way they do. And that's no small thing.

If you watch most online arguments, though, they seem to turn into the fighting kind more often than the friendly kind, and those don't lead to truth, agreement, understanding, or much of anything except hurt feelings. But it doesn't have to be that way. If people could be more diplomatic, more arguments would lead to understanding, and maybe even truth. I talk about that kind of diplomacy a lot, but I'm really not great at it. The other day, though, I got in a very civil argument with my friend Danny, who really is great at it. I tell him that if there's ever an election for National Political Referee, I'm nominating him. And sure enough, I ended up getting some real insight into how he, as a devout, moderate Christian, sees the world.

At issue was the idea of judgement. Even though I'm agnostic, I think Christianity has given the world some very worthwhile ideas. In particular, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the similar Sermon on the Plain in Luke strike me as being full of profound insights and wise advice: blessed are the peacemakers and the merciful, love your neighbor and even your enemies, turn the other cheek, don't be a hypocrite or make a big show of prayer and charity, watch for false prophets and wolves in sheep's clothing, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount also contains my favorite lines in the entire Bible: "Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not; neither do they spin. Yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

These are wise words, and the world would be a better place if more people (Christian and otherwise) followed them. But there are parts of both sermons I can't subscribe to. Turning the other cheek is a powerful idea, which people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King used to help change the world for the better. But I don't think you should turn the other cheek in every situation. What if someone is just going to take that as an invitation to beat you senseless? Then I can't see how there's anything wrong with fighting back, or at least leaving the scene. Turning the other cheek only works if it defuses violence, not if it encourages it. At least, that's how it seems to me.

Then there are the verses on judgement. Here are the ones from Matthew:
7 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
The part about taking the log out of your own eye seems like the height of wisdom to me. It's so easy to be a hypocrite, and to see the faults of others more clearly than our own. But how can you truly not judge anybody, ever? I've never been able to make sense of that idea. A while back, I was on a plane, across the aisle from a very drunk pair of friends who seemed to be in the process of falling out forever. One was yelling obscenities at the other. First the other passengers asked him to stop, then the flight attendent, and then the pilot, who told him he was on the verge of getting put off the plane and arrested. That finally shut him up, but not before he looked around and said, "All of you people are JUDGING me!"

We all nodded, like, "Yes, yes we are. Everyone on this plane is judging you. Why shouldn't we?"

Why indeed? Some behaviors are clearly bad, and the people doing them need to stop. How can a society work if we never judged people who are being insufferably rude, not to mention murderers, rapists, and thieves? The only way the verses in Matthew have ever made sense to me is to keep in mind what comes after "Do not judge," which is "so that you may not be judged." That is, don't judge unless you are prepared to be judged yourself, because you aren't perfect either. In other words, "Do not judge" is bound up with the teaching about hypocrisy.

Fair enough. It's certainly wrong for me to judge others without paying attention to my own flaws, or holding myself to the same standard I'm holding them to. If I judge the behavior of the guy on the plane as unacceptable, I should agree that it would be unacceptable if I did it, too. And I do--if I ever act like that, I hope somebody tosses me off that plane. But to say "Do not judge. Period"...how can that ever work in practice? You can't just let people run around being horrible, can you?

That's what I was asking Danny. I had shared an article called Ten Things You Can't Say While Following Jesus, because I was interested in seeing what some of my Christian friends thought about it. I mostly agreed with the article, not necessarily with the Christian perspective, but with the idea that saying things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "God never gives us more than we can handle" might not make a lot of sense. But one of the things the author took issue with is people saying "It's OK to judge." As I said, I think it's not only OK to judge sometimes; it's downright unavoidable. Danny was with the author of the article, though, saying that it's OK to judge only if you are God, and none of us are God. He went on to say, "The very thought that the sinner who is in church is somehow qualified to judge the sinner who is outside of it is completely false and goes against Jesus' teachings."

When I explained why I think judgement is unavoidable, he said:
I believe that a Christian's responsibility is to work on their own sin issues and just extend love to others. I look at it as a big enough job to manage my own sins without trying to focus on other's sins...that's between them and God. Now, I don't always succeed in not judging but I try not to. 
I feel like there is a lot of judgement of others by the Christian community and not nearly enough focus internally. I guess it's a lot easier to focus on others' sin than to try to fix ours. I also think the "lest ye be judged" part means that we should remember that we will be judged one day so we might want to extend the same grace and forgiveness that we hope for from God. I guess I also just wonder what value is to be gained from judgement. I figure it's just a big waste of time and energy that pushes people away from God.
Well put, but that didn't really address my question about how you deal with those who are behaving unacceptably. I said, "I guess a lot of this depends on the definition of judgement. I'm just saying we all have to judge people in the sense of saying 'that behavior is bad, and you need to stop it.' It doesn't necessarily mean 'I judge them a bad and irredeemable person.' I mean, I certainly have my own failings to attend to, but if I see, for example, someone being cruel to an animal, then I'm going to attend to their failing, too. And you would too, I'm thinking. We surely have slightly different interpretations of judgement going on here.

His response:
Yes...two different judgements. I make judgements every day in the way you mean. I was thinking more along the lines of judging them to be irredeemable, and that their sin is somehow worse than others, and that God is less willing/able to forgive. Also the idea that somehow he leaves us (Christians) to the task of deciding who is and is not redeemable. You are correct in that evangelicals (including me) believe that everyone sins as none of us is perfect. Some evangelicals (not me) also chose to believe that their sin is somehow less serious and more likely to be forgiven than other people's sin. This contradicts my understanding of the Bible. These are the evangelicals who drive people away from God and church.
That cleared it up for me. I finally understood how he, and probably many other Christians, see Jesus' admonition not to judge. It does mean, "Do not judge at all," if by judgment you mean, "You are a sinner and I am not." It doesn't mean you can never say someone's behavior is unacceptable. Those are two different kinds of judgment. Christians believe we are all fallen beings, born with original sin and thus undeserving of salvation, and that only by God's grace can we be saved. Within the context of those beliefs, "Do not judge...period" makes sense, at least when it comes to judging who is a sinner. It had seemed nonsensical to me, but that's because I wasn't looking at it through a Christian lens. Now I understood where he was coming from, and the Christian view of judgement is a lot clearer to me.

I still don't agree with him completely. I can't, without believing in the Christian framework of original sin, heaven and hell, and salvation through grace. But that's not the point here. The point is that two people with very different worldviews were able to have a civil discussion that actually led to understanding and clarity. I left with a better understanding of how another intelligent person sees the world, and I like to think he did too. We're probably never going to agree completely, and that's fine. But it's nice to know we can at least understand each other a little better, and that some online arguments are worth having.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Kesey's Letter: Thoughts on Truth and Empathy

Note: This is a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. I'm posting it again now because my last post was about symbolic logic, of all things, and it doesn't get much more dry and analytical than that. I feel like I should restore some balance by posting something a little less cold and mechanical. In fact, I wrote this in part to remind myself not to be too cold and mechanical. But it didn't work. I slipped back into a bit of emotional tone-deafness. It's a failing I have--I get so caught up in thinking that I forget to feel. That's really quite stupid, for reasons I explore below. So I'm going to remind myself again--hanging on to past insights is one of the major purposes of this blog, after all. I thought about tackling this topic all over again, and then I realized I probably won't be able to say it better than I said it here. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy. Anyway, here it is again:
.............................................................

I just read a letter by Ken Kesey, the '60's wildman famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and for leading a band of pioneer hippies known as the Merry Pranksters on a cross-country trip in a psychedelic school bus--a trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey's life was, oddly, defined by school buses.  In 1984, after Kesey had long since settled down, his son Jed was on another school bus, on his way to a wrestling meet.  The bus started sliding, and went over a cliff.  Jed was comatose when he was pulled from the bus, and died a few days later. Kesey wrote the letter afterward to some of his closest friends, describing his son's last minutes in the hospital, and his touching funeral. It's a heartbreaking, honest, beautiful letter, written by a man bent with grief but still overwhelmed by his love for his friends and family, and for the relentless beauty of a world where birds keep right on singing, no matter who was just buried.

But don't rely on my second-hand account.  By all means, read it yourself (unless now is not a convenient time to shed a tear). I'm going to wait, though, and put the link at the bottom of this post. If you read the letter now, you're not going to want to come back to my anemic, overly-analytical scribblings which it inspired.  At least, I wouldn't if I were you.

My friend who recommended the letter to me said it made her “cry noisily.” It didn't quite do that to me, and that's probably my loss. But it did make me think. Well, that's not quite right. It made me feel, and then think. I'm usually more of a thinker than a feeler.  I'm one of those withdrawn ponderers who is as attracted to ideas as to people (unless they're people who have a lot of interesting things to say).  For years, I've imagined that I prefer facts to feelings, not realizing until today just how silly that statement is. Why it is so silly will take some explaining.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Logic for the Complete Idiot

"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end." - Mr. Spock


Recently I heard someone declare that liberals are incapable of logical thought. But that same day, I saw a meme floating around Facebook making fun of "Republican Logic 101." So clearly some liberals think the conservatives are the illogical ones. You can find similar memes attacking atheist logic, or Christian logic, or creationist logic, or "evolutionist" logic. Everybody thinks their side is logical, and the other side isn't. The world is full of people who think they understand logic. What it is not full of is people who really do. 

The truth is, most people have barely a clue how logic really works. Take me, for example. I've always tried hard to think logically, and I tell myself I'm pretty good at it. I've even read a couple dozen books about critical thinking and informal logic. I can spot a straw man, a red herring, and many other fallacies (at least when other people commit them), and I can tell you about a multitude of cognitive biases that keep us from being as smart as we think we are. So you can imagine my horror when I recently picked up a book called Logic for Dummies, started reading it, and thought, "Maybe I should start with the Complete Idiot's Guide." 

My only consolation is that Logic for Dummies is all about formal logic. It's full of Venn diagrams, truth tables and strings of symbols that look like some kind of alien algebra. It's more mathematical than linguistic. And it's not easy. Well, it's not easy for me...few things involving the word "formal" are. Still, in this post I want to explore what I've learned so far. For one thing, maybe I can save someone the initial bewilderment I had when I started trying to learn about formal logic. Beyond that, though, I want to explore how useful formal logic might be in everyday debates. 

What is Formal Logic?

First the basics. Formal logic is a way of putting some arguments people make in ordinary language into a precise, standardized form, in order to determine unambiguously whether they're valid or not. I say "some" arguments because formal logic is mostly concerned with deductive arguments--arguments where the truth of the conclusion depends on the structure of the argument, not the content of the premises. If a valid deductive argument has true premises, it can't help but have a true conclusion. That's what valid means. With invalid arguments, it's possible for the conclusion to be false even if the premises are true. 

For example:
If Bubba ate that green porkchop yesterday, he will be sick today.
Bubba is not sick today.
Therefore, Bubba did not eat that green porkchop yesterday.
That's a valid argument, of the form called modus tollens. If both premises are true, the conclusion can't help being true, just by virtue of the structure of the argument. However:
If Bubba ate that green porkchop yesterday, he will be sick today.
Bubba is sick today.
Therefore, Bubba ate that green porkchop yesterday.
That's not a valid argument--it's the fallacy called affirming the consequent. Bubba could have passed on the porkchop but gotten sick for other reasons. The conclusion might be true if the premises are true, but it isn't necessarily true. Validity and truth are connected, but they aren't the same thing. An argument can have totally ludicrous premises and an equally ludicrous conclusion, and still be valid. For example:
If lizards play fiddles, then frogs will dance jigs.
Lizards play fiddles.
Therefore, frogs will dance jigs. 
That's a valid argument, with a form known as modus ponens. But valid doesn't mean true. It's just that if the premises were true, then the conclusion would be as well. Lizards, alas, do not play fiddles. Conversely, an argument could have true premises and a true conclusion, but still be invalid. Even if Bubba ate that porkchop and then got sick, the second argument above still isn't valid. If an argument is both true and valid, it's said to be sound. If it's valid but not true, like the one about lizards and frogs, it's unsound.

Formal logic, then, is concerned with deductive validity, not truth. It's the study of what conclusions can be validly drawn based on certain arrangements of premises. That makes it limited when it comes to everyday arguments, because many of those are inductive, not deductive. An inductive argument is any argument where the premises may support the conclusion, but the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premises by virtue of the argument's structure. Analogies, generalizations, predictions based on past observations--those are all inductive. The second Bubba syllogism above might be a decent inductive argument. You might hear that Bubba is sick and correctly guess that it's because he ate that porkchop. But the premises only support the conclusion inductively, not deductively. 

So far, none of this seems all that hard. But the devil is in the details. If you want to learn how to translate ordinary arguments into the symbols and structures of formal logic, it gets really complicated. For one thing, there are several kinds of formal logic, and logicians can't seem to agree on what to call them. There's propositional logic, which is sometimes called sentential logic, sentence logic, or truth functional logic. Then there's predicate logic, which is sometimes called quantifier logic. So, the first thing we have to do is get the different types of logic sorted out. 

Most introductory textbooks on logic cover three branches: categorical logic, propositional logic, and predicate logic. Categorical logic is concerned with classes of things, and is based on statements like "All cats are mammals" or "Some mammals are not quadrupeds." Categorical logic is a way of reasoning about which things belong in different classes, and it's the kind of logic that uses Venn diagrams--the little conjoined circles that show which classes do and don't overlap. It's also the oldest kind of logic. It was basically invented by Aristotle. It looks the simplest, but don't let that fool you. When you actually try to use it, it's a lot tougher than it looks. 

Propositional logic developed later, among the Stoics. Unlike categorical logic, which is concerned with terms inside phrases, propositional logic is concerned with the relationship between whole phrases, each containing a subject and a predicate. To see the difference, consider the phrase "Lassie is a collie" In categorical logic that would be an entire line in a syllogism. It's concerned with two terms, or classes of things: things identical to Lassie (in logic jargon), and collies. It might be symbolized as "All L are C." In propositional logic, that phrase would just be one part of a line, for example, "If lassie is a collie, then she is smart." Now the whole phrases on either side of the comma can be turned into single symbols, so we might have "If L (lassie is a collie) then S (she is smart)." The "atoms" of categorical logic are smaller parts of sentences than the atoms of propositional logic. 

Propositional logic can be completely expressed in symbols, so it looks almost like algebra. Here are the five basic symbols it uses.
⊃ means "implies" or "if, then"    Example: "If L then S" becomes "L ⊃ S"
~ means "not"                             Example: "It is not the case that L" becomes "~L"
• means "and"                             Example: "L and D" becomes "L • D"
˅ means "or"                               Example: "L or D" becomes "L ˅ D"
≡ means "if and only if"              Example "L if and only if D" becomes "L ≡ D"
Propositional logic lets you write complicated statements using efficient little symbols that can then be manipulated according to a set of standard rules, similar to algebra. Whereas in algebra you swap symbols around to find the value of a variable, in propositional logic you swap symbols around to see what conclusions follow from a set of premises. Each statement is said to have a certain truth value: either true (T) or false (F). Compound statements linked together with the symbols above also have truth values, which depend on the truth values of each statement they link. For example, L • D is true if both L and D are true. If one or both are false, then the whole statement is false. This can be represented in a table, called a truth table:

L
D
L • D
T
T
T
F
T
F
T
F
F
F
F
F

All the other logical operators have particular truth tables, and they can all be combined into a single table, like so: 

L
D
~D
L • D
L ˅ D
⊃ D
L ≡ D
T
T
F
T
T
T
T
F
T
F
F
T
T
F
T
F
T
F
T
F
F
F
F
T
F
F
T
T

You can check to see if a syllogism is valid by putting the premises and the conclusion in a truth table. If there's any row where the premises are true, but the conclusion is false, then the argument is invalid. In other words, the truth of the conclusion doesn't always follow from the premises. 

Obviously, categorical logic and propositional logic are two very different animals, useful for different things. A third kind of logic, called predicate logic, is a way of combining their respective strengths into a single symbolic system. It starts with the same symbols and rules as propositional logic, but expands on them with two more symbols: ∀ for "All" and ∃ for "some" (or more precisely "at least one"). I won't get into predicate logic, because I'm just starting to get the hang of it myself, but it's a very powerful system for figuring out both categorical and propositional questions. It's also a pretty tough to understand, at least for my kind of brain.

What's also tough, with all three branches of logic, is translating the arguments people make in everyday life into formal logic. People don't speak in formal syllogisms. They put conclusions before premises, leave premises unspoken, and use language that can be interpreted multiple ways. Another problem with translation is that logical operators like "some", "or", and "if, then" have very precise meanings in formal logic that may be different from their meanings in everyday speech. For example, in logic "some" means "at least one". There's no way to make distinctions like "most", "almost all", or "just a few". It sacrifices nuance for precision. "Some" is also confusing because if you make a statement like "Some plumbers are redheads", that doesn't imply that "Some plumbers are not redheads" The first statement makes no such claim, even though in ordinary speech people often use "some" to mean "some are and some aren't."

Then there's "or". People use that word in two different ways: 1. "One or the other, or both" or 2. "One or the other, but not both." In logic, "or" only corresponds to the first statement. That's why in the truth table above, L ˅ D is true if either or both L or D are true. It's only false if neither are true. 

For my money, though, "if, then" is the most confusing logical operator. When you were a kid and your mom told you, "If you do your homework, then you can watch TV", you knew she meant "if and only if." But that's not how it's interpreted in logic. Let's symbolize mom's statement as H ⊃ T. All that means is that if it's true that you do your homework, then it's also true that you can watch TV. It doesn't mean that if you didn't do your homework, you can't watch TV. As the truth table above shows, if H is false and T is true, ⊃ T is still considered true. It's only false if you did do your homework, but still can't watch TV; in other words, if H is true and T is false. Doing homework is sufficient, but not necessary, for watching TV. If you want to say, "Only if you do your homework can you watch TV", you would have to symbolize that as T ⊃ H. In other words: "If watch TV, then it must be true that you did your homework." Counterintuitive, isn't it? If you want to make it clear that you can watch TV if and only if you do your homework, you have to symbolize that as (⊃ T) • (⊃ H), or simply H ≡ T.

What's it Good For?

I started learning about formal logic because I realized that if I really want to understand critical thinking and informal logic in any kind of deep way, then I'm going to have to get at least a basic grasp of formal logic. But I was also curious about something else. In the late 1600's, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz envisioned a system of formal logic so complete that it could settle any debate. As he put it, "if someone would doubt my results, I should say to him: 'Let us calculate Sir': and thus by taking to pen and ink, we should soon settle the question."

To what extent, I wondered, does formal logic live up to Leibniz's dream? Does let us settle questions just by calculating? Well, sometimes, but not always, or even usually. Formal logic obviously has severe limitations, or there wouldn't be so many disagreements today between philosophers who are fluent in it. But surely formal logic could help us resolve some everyday arguments, by putting them into a more precise form and identifying the ones that turn out to be invalid? Of course, this would only work if both parties to the argument could follow formal logic. If I'm debating someone, and I try to prove my point by converting it into symbols and writing proofs, my opponent won't have any reason to take such odd behavior seriously unless they also understood what the symbols mean. For all they know, I could just be making them up. So, for formal logic to be really useful in day to day discussions, people would have to learn it in school, the way they learn algebra. It's not really any more complicated, and it could be far more useful on a daily basis.

At least, I think it could. I'm honestly not sure. After all, valid deductive reasoning is just one aspect of rationality. It can't tell us which premises are true, and it can't help with inductive arguments, which are probably far more common anyway. But I still wonder--what would happen if we started teaching everyone the basics of formal logic? Would it makes us clearer thinkers? Would it help settle debates? I don't know. Maybe I'll have a better idea when I understand it better myself.