Stephen Downes

This item popped up in my RSS feed today, and as happens surprisingly often, it ties together a bunch of threads from my experiences on the internet today. Here's what the paper (80 page PDF) discusses: how does logic lead us to the conclusions it does? "The starting point of formal logic (is) that an argument is good in virtue of its form (in some sense)," writes Ben Martin. But does the form make the argument good, or is it just how we recognize that it's good? How do logicians actually draw their conclusions? This ties into the discussion of Colors and Numbers (also in this issue) on Mastodon. Does a form (or a pattern) exist in such a way as to be able to cause events, such as the formation of a belief? If different people see the world differently, do different things exist? It also speaks to my response on LinkedIn to Patrick Dempsey as he trots out the old canard that "thinking skills cannot readily be separated from one subject matter and applied to other subject matters." But that's exactly what patterns and forms do - they let us reason using common forms and patterns across multiple disciplines. That's what makes these patterns relevant, and other patterns (that we nonetheless often ask children to memorize) irrelevant. As Martin says, "the mechanisms by which logics are chosen are those we are accustomed to from the sciences: predictive success, explanatory power, and compatibility with other well-evidenced commitments."