The problem with relying on logical thinking alone is that it can let your guard down.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, mathematicians realized that logic doesn’t actually get you that far. As described previously, logic is as strong as a set of axioms behind it. This is fine in a highly contrived world, like one of Peano or Euclid but in the real world, there are simply too many axiom sets.

Roughly, the axioms correspond to two things:

• One’s philosophy and values, fundamental things one can’t break down any further
• Information that one has to treat as fundamental simply because breaking it down is too hard

To the sixteenth-century Europeans, for example, the properties of magnets were axiomatic because, even to the respected scientists of that time, the knowledge necessary to understand magnetism as a consequence of some simpler laws was missing and could not easily be derived from first principles (i.e. it’s not that the scientists at the time were illogical).

If you are talking to somebody who is a good logical thinker and also has good argumentative skills, it’s possible that he or she may convince you pretty much of everything by selecting the axioms he or she cares about and using them in the argument. You would be able to follow the entire conversation without ever exposing a logical flaw in the argument but what you may fail to see is that at the end of the day, there is a degree of arbitrariness in the argument that comes from what axioms were picked. In other words, smart people can rationalize anything.

What should you do when this happens? It’s not easy.

• Understand that there are other axioms out there. Perhaps there are other reasons against something. Since they are axioms, it will be very hard to trade them off against each other. Point out the fact that neither you nor the person you are talking to are sufficiently equipped to perform the trade-off analysis and thus either of you may be making a wrong decision.
• Use other sources of reasoning other than logic. Intuition and experience is a good one — it shouldn’t be relied upon too heavily but you can extract value in the fact that you saw something fail several dozen times: perhaps it’s more prone to failure, regardless of whether you can derive the reason using only logic. Sometimes decisions hinge on human nature — your understanding of human emotion can help you make a better decision.

In other words, prefer logical thinking, but don’t use it as a silver bullet.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 14:51 and is filed under for reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.