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wedrifid comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong
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This is not a good way to argue about anything except mathematics. It takes the wrong attitude towards how words work and in practice doesn't even make arguments easier to debug because there are usually implicit premises that are not easy to tease out.
For example, suppose I say "A (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. B (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. C (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. Therefore, X hasn't changed." There's an implicit premise here, namely "A, B, C are the only things that affect X," which is almost certainly false. It is annoyingly easy not to explicitly write down such implicit premises, and trying to argue in this pseudo-logical style encourages that mistake among others.
(In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.)
People who have not studied mathematical logic reserved the word well before those who have studied mathematical logic. If a field wants to make a word that means something different to what it used to mean or is exclusive to those in the field then it should make up a new word.
I should clarify. I'm not exactly worried that people will mix up the colloquial meaning of logic with the mathematical meaning of mathematical logic. I just want people to taboo "logic" because I think it is frequently used to label a particular style of bad argument in order to mask certain kinds of weaknesses that such arguments have. Studying mathematical logic is one way to recognize that there's something off about how people colloquially use the word "logic," but I suppose it's not the only way.
Would the quote sound as bad to you if “logic” was replaced with “reasoning”?
As per Postel's law, if a word has both a colloquial meaning and a technical meaning, the latter is not what I want, and there's a decent synonym for the former, I personally use the synonym instead (e.g. “usefulness” instead of “utility”, “substantial” or “sizeable” instead of “significant”, etc.), but as per Postel's law I don't demand that other people do the same, especially if the colloquial meaning is way more widespread overall.