Dear Spiros,Delightful. I'm reminded of a similar exchange from some months back. I had mentioned to a colleague form another department that some philosophers allege that God's existence could be proved by using only basic logic. She responded:
I thought of you the other day. Our department just released the results from its graduate logic exam and as usual half of the students did not pass. Every year the unsuccessful students react by grumbling about the pointlessness of having a logic requirement in the first place. So I was in our mailroom, and overheard two students:
A: [...] Logic is so useless anyway.
B: I know. Like... if logic were important, Hegel would have thought so. But he didn't give a shit about p's and q's...
At this point, I broke in and said: Modus Tollens strikes again! Good thing it's valid!
As I was walking away, I heard the one student say to the other: What did he say?
The other student replied: Who the fuck knows...
This is where postmodernism really helps. If your "basic logic" [yes-- she provided the sneer quotes with her fingers] proves that there's a God, then basic logic is wrong.
I replied: So you accept modus tollens...
Her reply: What's that?
17 comments:
If this post made me smile then logic must be fun!
One man's modus ponens is another man's "huh?"
Though really, you have only your own admissions committee to blame for admitting people who not only don't know what modus tollens is but also don't even have the sense of self-preservation to save their "who the fuck knows?" for when the faculty member is out of earshot.
("you," of course, being the correspondent.)
Yeah, a dopey fellow graduate student sat in on my logic class a few years back. (He was planning on teaching the intro to logic the next semester!) He confided to me after the class's overview of categorical rules and the square of opposition that "Not even one of these rules is something I'll ever use!" To which I asked, "So they're all useless to you?" He agreed.
I guffawed, but he never batted an eye. I then showed him that he'd just used contradiction and obversion to make that inference! He whispered audibly, "Now you're being a dick about it." Sheesh! Of course! Especially for someone about to go teach a logic class!
Surely there's a term for those who've been "hoist upon their own petard," but who fail to recognize it and blithely continue on. I like "total frakin' idjits," but maybe something more poetic would be better....
"That guy's a fuckin' petard."
pronounced "pee' tard" of course.
Not very poetic, I admit.
Spiros, I'm so grateful for this blog
Imagine being in a department WITHOUT a graduate logic exam because one's colleagues consider it "exclusionary". Yeah, excludes the incompetent. We wouldn't want that... I need to get the hell out of here.
mmdetritus: "a petard"... love it!
Classic Family Guy episode.
http://animatedtv.about.com/od/fgmultimedia/ig/-Family-Guy--Pictures/fGuyPetarded_v2_72-jpg.htm
It shouldn’t, but this post makes me happy, in a Schadenfreude kind of way: at least it’s not only people in English departments who think that rudimentary principles of deductive logic don’t apply to them.
On the other hand, I’m distressed that even the most incompetent of Philosophy graduate students would be under the impression that Hegel didn’t think much of logic. Not only is one of his principle works titled The Science of Logic, but he argues at some length in that work that logic gives us access to the inner nature of reality. It’s hard to find a philosopher who takes logic more seriously than Hegel.
Pure magic -- and I like Hegel!
I wish I had more fingers so that I could get the following knuckle tattoos: ponens on the right hand and tollens on the left.
I'm sure our dimwitted students were thinking nothing like this but there is a way to reject orthodox rules of inference and yet still engage in reasoning that superficially appears to conform to those rules without any incoherence. To accept Modus Tollens, I need not remind all you schadenfreude soaked experts, is to hold that are no instances of (p --> q, -q, there4 -p) with true premises and a false conclusion. I could hold that there are some counterexamples to Modus Tollens (perhaps when self-reference or certain kinds of nested conditonals are involved) and thus Modus Tollens is invalid. But I could at the same time admit that there are other cases where I might unproblematically infer not-p from if p, q and not-q. And I might insist that when I do this I am not employing the rule Modus Tollens because MT says that it's okay to reason this way no matter what p and q stand for. I might insist that I am using a more subtle rule than that. And I might go on to insist that more subtle rules like this are the rules that I (or we) actually use in reasoning. This gives me a way to say that "logic" (understood as classical two-value schoolbook logic) is useless without rejecting reason altogether. That move keeps my petard plenty clear of my ass.
That said, allow me echo the sentiment of the post and the previous comments. Students suck. Hegel is full of shit.
Kant help us all. This is frightening.
I'm an MA student at a school which only awards MAs; most students are required to teach an intro to logic course. I was very, very rusty when I took our qualifying exam and I bombed it. I went back and studied carefully for a couple weeks...all the while teaching the course. While I'm thankful for the opportunity, the fact is I was ill-prepared to teach that course and those in my first class suffered because of it. I'd like to believe I've improved, at least! In any case, I know of at least two other students who are even less competent than I was at the time...but even they know what a flippin' MT is!
This is obviously a problem, but I also think it's reflected in popular culture. I've often heard things like "wait, how can you teach logic?" or "why is logic part of the philosophy program?" from those outside academia. What's bloody frightening is that philosophy grad students are offering similarly ill-informed views.
"[Y]ou have only your own admissions committee to blame for admitting people who [...] don't know what modus tollens is."Sure. But if your department admits "Continental" students, you can bet that most (all?) of them haven't the slightest clue about logic.
interesting results, I want to implement a study about the social behavior in men and women, find out the difference between the interaction of one and other genre.
Hi… that was great stuff.. I really like this subject. Could you tell me more … I would love to explore.
Wow half didn't pass, that is quite disturbing.
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