Whenever we make a decision, pass a judgment, or express a position, we do so in a fairly patterned fashion. Logic is the formal study of correct patterns of reasoning. : What do you think is the point of logic? What do you think we study in logic and why? Share with a partner! 2. Could learning concepts like the bolded ones above help you in future discussions? If so, how? : Can you think of any discussions in your experience that are similar to the one between Students A and B? Share with the class/with a partner, explaining why you had a disagreement and what it was about. That is, Student B thinks you can’t infer “color isn’t real” from the premises Student A offers. Student B isn’t convinced, because they don’t think that the conclusion follows from the premises. To try to convince Student B, Student A presents an argument with premises: “seeing is light hitting our eyes”, “the frequency of the light determines the color we see”, (and other premises). What’s happening here? Well, Students A and B are arguing about a conclusion: “color is (not) real”. Couldn’t we use our brains to get the sensation of different colors from light waves with different frequencies AND for it to be true that the objects are actually colored? Maybe the light waves just transfer the color from the object to our brains? If you want me to believe your conclusion, you are going to have to give me a better argument than that! I accept that our brains react differently to different light waves when we see color, but you haven’t given me a reason to think that this directly means that color isn’t real. Thus, different colors don’t have anything to do with the objects we are seeing, it’s just different kinds of light waves!ī: Well, what you say may be true, but I’m not sure that you’ve proved to me that ‘color isn’t real’.Ī: What do you mean? I just told you that color is just our brain’s response to light waves, so color is just something ‘in our brains’, or at least something that we think we see after our brain processes light in a certain way - the stuff we think has different colors might all in fact just be the same shade of gray the only thing that matters is how our brain processes different light waves!ī: You still haven’t convinced me. The reason something looks ‘blue’ is just because the light that bounces off of it is a different frequency than the light from something that looks ‘red’. Why do you think that?Ī: Well, we see with our eyes, right? And seeing is just what happens when light hits our eyes and our brain processes it in a certain way. Student A: Hey there! I just realized something really cool.ī: Ok, I’m confused. Consider the following conversation between two students: Logic is all about argument and persuasion. “The point of logic is to give an account of the notion of validity: what follows from what” (Graham Priest, Introduction to Non-Classical Logic, 2008) Part I: Lesson 1.
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