A. The Retreat of Baby Logic
The title of this essay looks forward to a time
when teachers of critical thinking, engaged in
pedagogical rumination over their morning cups of tea,
may ask themselves why elementary formal logic is no
longer included in the content of their courses. In
many parts of North America, this scenario is already
enacted. Formal approaches to critical thinking,
however, still hold sway in isolated pockets of the
philosophical academic community. This polemic is
directed primarily at those pockets, though it may be of
interest to those who have already made the leap to
informal logic and beyond, but are interested in
exploring the pedagogical motivations for this leap.
"Baby logic" is the somewhat deprecatory name given
by philosophers to the courses they teach in
introductory formal logic. Though these often contain
an informal component, they typically focus on the
propositional calculus and first-order predicate
calculus. Standard content would be translations of
English sentences into symbolism, differences between
the logical connectives and their English colleagues
(including the paradoxes of material implication), the
notion of an axiomatic system, axioms and theorems,
derivations (often by a natural deduction system), and
such semantic tools as truth-tables and truth-trees.
Some courses go as far as completeness and consistency
proofs for propositional calculus, though such
metalogical excursions are rare. Modal logic is also
unusual in this context.
Baby logic, of course, has its uses. Firstly, it
is needed as a part of philosophical training, certainly
as an introduction to the study of logic proper, but
also as a way of grounding an interest in many of the
standard problems. The history of philosophy cannot be
understood without some formal training. Although I am
of the opinion that logic is of little relevance to the
successful treatment of philosophical problems, this
opinion is controversial, so that logic is required as
an aid to understanding contemporary positions too.
Secondly, it is helpful to students who go on to
study not philosophy, but mathematics or computing
science, and sometimes other disciplines such as
theoretical physics or even economics which might
incorporate mathematics or computer science.
Thirdly, it is helpful in ways aside from its
content to students who would benefit from sheer
brainwork of a rigorous and analytical kind. It is
difficult to prove the generalizability of formal logic
skills to other areas where there is no overlap of
conceptual content, but I concede to the logicians that
it exists.
My dissatisfaction with baby logic arises only in a
certain context, that of introductory courses in
critical thinking. As these are rapidly becoming the
bread-and-butter of philosophy departments all over
North America, it is well to ask whether they provide
what the rest of the academic community believes them to
provide.
B. Why is Critical Thinking so Popular?
There are, I think, three reasons for the
popularity of critical thinking courses in typical
post-secondary curricula. First, they are perceived as
promoting educational achievement, through the
development of the abilities and attitudes of rational
evaluation. Second, they are seen as facilitating "good
citizenship", the abilities and attitudes appropriate to
participation in representative democracies (Glaser
1985; Sabini & Silver 1985). Third, it is said that the
demands of modern social life require, even outside the
immediate realm of politics, a critical flexibility of
thought and attitude in the face of conflicting
lifestyles, information overload and job obsolescence
(Scriven 1985; Postman 1985; Daly 1986). The connection
between the first reason and the others is clear - "good
citizenship" and critical flexibility consist in the
exercise in a certain non-academic context of the same
skills and tendencies as are demonstrative of
rationality in an academic context.
The goal of critical thinking instruction can be
characterized in a way which pays tribute to each of the
above reasons. Let us say that the aim is to enable the
student to approach the ideal of being an autonomous
thinker within a community of thinkers. The notion of
autonomy captures the importance of independence of
thought, of having a point of view which is one's own;
that of community emphasises the sense in which
independence is constrained by the canons of
rationality. This ideal is one which will perhaps be
recognised as the goal of all serious academic education
(arguably of all education), according to those who
practise it most self-consciously. It is characteristic
of successful practitioners of any discipline, academic
or professional, that they fulfil this ideal. It is
also one of the most common complaints about "today's
students" that they seem unable to do so.
In many areas of North America, at least, critical
thinking courses are receiving great emphasis as a means
of addressing the perceived problem that most academic
instruction does little to encourage the above ideal.
Whether this perception is accurate, what are the causes
of the problem and whether critical thinking courses are
an adequate response are all difficult questions which
cannot be answered here. The question I wish to address
is, merely, "To what extent, if any, does the inclusion
of baby logic in critical thinking courses further the
ideal?".
C. The Holistic Goal of Critical Thinking Instruction
Let us call the purpose of facilitating the
student's growth towards becoming an autonomous thinker
within a community of thinkers the "holistic goal of
critical thinking instruction." This way of describing
it connects it with the liberal arts ideal of
"developing the whole person" and with the Aristotelian
notion that education has as much to do with habits and
attitudes as with information and technical skills.
The relationship between the holistic goal of
critical thinking and the technical skills which are
exemplified by the critical thinker has been explored by
Richard Paul (1982; and unpublished). Partly as a
result of his work, it is now a commonplace among
teachers of critical thinking that it is through the
student's acquisition of the technical skills of
reasoning, and the consequent development of critical
attitudes, that the holistic goal is achieved. Critical
thinking in the "technical" (or "weak") sense is
necessary, but not sufficient, for critical thinking in
the "holistic" (or "strong") sense.
It is not difficult to see why this is so when we
look at the products of failed critical thinking
instruction. If we have taught baby logic, informal
logic or critical thinking, we are familiar with the
student who might be described as a "logic-chopper".
This student has internalised the techniques of the
course, but displays a marked lack of restraint in their
use. He over-estimates the scope of their application,
where this will help to refute another's argument, but
under-estimates it in reference to the possibility of
self-criticism. This person lacks the balance which is
distinctive of the critical thinker.
Closely allied with the logic-chopper is the
"myopic", the student who cannot generalize what has
been learned in logic or critical thinking class to
other academic areas, nor to matters outside the
academic life. Examples inside the course are seen as
appropriate raw material for the exercise of critical
techniques, but when arguments occur elsewhere, they are
not recognised as such, or simply not subjected to the
same degree of scrutiny.
More common than the above types, but equally
deviant from the goal of critical thinking, is the
"chromatophobe", who wishes to have everything black and
white. Uncomfortable with uncertainty, this person
prefers a decisive reaction to an issue posed (even when
this is decisively suspending judgment!) to a difficult
weighing of conflicting claims to credibility.
To the extent that my caricatures have some basis
in reality, all three of these types represent failures
in critical thinking instruction (or else flaws in the
raw material). Their inadequacies are matters of
attitude rather than of technical skill. In my own
experience, furthermore, there is a less than perfect
correlation between intelligence and their avoidance. I
suspect that my experience here is shared by other
critical thinking instructors.
However, it seems reasonable to suppose that
through appropriate training in the technical skills of
critical thinking, and through appropriate discussion
about the use of those skills, the attitudinal
shortcomings can be overcome. One who thinks about how
to use a hammer will generally be in a better position
to recognise when and when not to use it. The
assumption of more recent directions in critical
thinking instruction is that progress towards a better
understanding (and hence an adoption) of critical
attitudes is maximised by explicit discussion of and
practice in those attitudes (Resnick 1987).
D. Does Baby Logic Fulfil the Holistic Goal?
The burning question, then, is to what extent
courses in baby logic contribute to the development of
critical thinking as conceived under the "holistic"
model. This question is not easy to answer at the
present time.
The main problem is that it is an empirical
question, and waits upon the results of empirical
studies of pedagogical effectiveness. I know of no
studies which would help me answer the question. It
would not be surprising if none existed, for there are
obvious difficulties in operationalizing and measuring
highly developed critical thinking attitudes. I would
be grateful if anyone could bring such work to my
attention, since it would release me from the necessity
for the possibly contentious conceptual argument on
which I base my answer to the question.
My answer, clearly, is that baby logic is far from
the best way to encourage the development of
higher-order critical thinking. My argument proceeds
from the contention that simple logic is conceptually
too barren to allow for the exercise of the attitudes
and habits of thought which characterize the developed
critical thinker.
The primary reason for this is that at the level of
elementary logic all questions are decidable in a
determinate fashion. Derivations do not sometimes
produce one result, sometimes another; there are not
alternative formulations of the truth-table for a
particular connective; there are clear ways of
distinguishing valid from invalid arguments. What
Wittgenstein (1968 ##107-8) calls the "crystalline
purity" of logic, a feature it shares with simple
mathematics, ensures that there is a single correct
answer to every question one might ask. While this
feature may disappear when one enters the higher realms
of logical inquiry, there is no doubt that it permeates
the lower levels.
From the point of view of the student, mastering
logic then becomes a matter of learning to apply rules,
with in each case a unique correct outcome. There may
be room for individual variance in such things as the
order of derivation, but this is extremely limited.
Most complicating factors, such as
ambiguities of interpretation, are filtered out in
advance of the application of logical method: they are
unanalysable because of
the simplicity of logical concepts. The focus is on the
perfection of a certain technique, and one which is
relatively insensitive to variations in the raw
material.
The purity of logic is not without its attractions.
The elegance of certain derivations, the curiosity of
the differences between truth-functional connectives and
their ordinary-language counterparts, the clarity of
mathematical precision, all make up a world which can be
a delight to the inquiring mind. But it is not the
world in which we live. When a logic teacher launches
into an explanation of the paradoxes of material
implication, a line has been crossed. It is the line
which separates her subject from its alleged
applicability to reasoning in real life. It is the line
which separates fascination with a technique from the
development of a rational worldview.
What is required for the development of a rational
worldview is a functional understanding of such concepts
as plausibility, degree of support and balance of
considerations. For these, and concepts like them, are
the fulcra about which the evaluation of real-life
argumentation turns. To aim at any lesser degree of
sophistication in conceptual development is either
seriously to underestimate the complexity of argument or
to fail to prepare one's students for the life which
awaits them. It is to leave oneself open to the charges
against Socrates (Stone 1989).
It is the very seductiveness of the simplicity of
elementary logic which has the potential to lead
students towards the attitudes and habits which typify
the deviant critical thinker. Encouraging the search for
certainty predisposes the student to be impatient with
uncertainty: hence the chromatophobe. When that
impatience is manifested in the evaluation of real-life
argumentation, we have the logic-chopper. Even if the
student remains sensitive to the incongruity of
real-life argument and simple logic, the natural effect
of emphasis on the latter is the failure to generalize:
hence the myopic.
If one were to search for a single word which
describes what these deviants lack, a likely candidate
would be "judgment". Critical discourse in real life is
polychromatic; the ability to distinguish fine hues is
judgment; the pretence that such discourse can be
evaluated in black-and-white terms cannot be sustained.
E. How to Save the Bathwater
Having expressed the case for my thesis, I wish to
look at some possible rebuttals, and to suggest some
conciliatory moves I might be willing to make.
A long time ago, a professor of philosophy for whom
I worked as teaching assistant expressed to me the
opinion that it was unnecessary to include any informal
logic in an introductory course in this area, on the
grounds that "all natural arguments are syllogistic."
If it were sound, this argument would certainly be
powerful ammunition against the position I am here
supporting. However, it overlooks some important
distinctions. To see why this is so, we need to clarify
the original claim.
I think what was meant was that given any plausible
explicit argument encountered in real life, one could,
by suitable choice of suppressed premisses, reconstruct
either a valid syllogistic argument or an argument of
the form of a common syllogistic fallacy. There is much
to be said for this logical point. The problem is that
it fails to justify the conclusion that informal logic
is unnecessary.
One reason for this is that there is no guarantee
that such a reconstruction would be at all faithful to
the intentions of the original arguer. It will very
often involve attributing to her universal
generalizations, for example, to which she would
correctly deny being committed. As a result, unless the
argument truly is syllogistically invalid in a simple
way, an evaluation based on the reconstruction will
stand a very good chance of being entirely irrelevant to
the argument put forward by the
arguer. Here we can already imagine the logic-chopper
in operation.
(It might be worthwhile inserting the parenthetical
note that I do not think the present argument is
relevant only to cases where the attempted
reconstruction is in the form of a deductive syllogism.
The same problem arises for attempts involving
inductive syllogism, containing restricted
generalizations ("Most A ...); examples of arguments
which are resistant to reconstruction as inductive
enthymemes are to be found, I suggest, in the realms of
analogical and conductive argument as well as certain
kinds of practical reasoning.)
The central point is that while all arguments may
be syllogistic in the sense of being subject to
enthymemic reconstruction, not all arguments are
syllogistic in the sense that this reconstruction
correctly represents the author's intentions, nor even
her unintended commitments. Only if the second sense
were applicable would it follow that an adequate
evaluation of the argument could be carried out in
syllogistic (or quantificational) logic alone. The
rebuttal thus appears to be guilty of equivocation.
A second reason is that treating all natural
arguments as syllogistic may focus students on
inappropriate concepts of argument evaluation. The main
fulcra of syllogistic evaluation are formal validity and
the truth-value of the premisses. Some natural
arguments may be formally invalid, but I should hazard
the guess that most faulty natural arguments, if
reconstructed syllogistically, would suffer in the main
from unacceptable premisses, suppressed or otherwise.
It is quite natural that in teaching baby logic we
concentrate on the clearcut assessment of formal
validity, leaving truth to empirical science or
observation, but this approach leaves the student ill-
equipped to deal with the complex, and more common,
problems of unacceptability. Informal logic is
necessary for these purposes.
The first rebuttal is founded, I think, on a
misconception of the very purpose of critical thinking
instruction. I would say this is to facilitate the
development of the skills of evaluative reason as
applicable to the real-life experience of the student.
The rebuttal seems to presuppose that it is sufficient
to facilitate the understanding of certain formal truths
which do not permit of wide application.
A more plausible rebuttal starts from the
observation that sometimes people do make argumentative
mistakes which are simply truth-functional or
quantificational in form. Baby logic provides a way of
clarifying the concepts used in the evaluation
of these kinds of mistake. Therefore, it seems that it
would be foolhardy to ignore the need for students to
incorporate these concepts by being introduced to formal
logic.
My reaction to this is to suggest that the concepts
can be explained and assimilated without recourse to
formal techniques. So-called formal fallacies such as
affirming the consequent can be explained in natural
language, I would suggest, much more efficiently than
through the acquisition of familiarity with formal
logic. A semi-formal, abbreviational approach has much
to recommend it: in this way, too, it is possible to
bring in the notion, so important in the discussion of
the truth-functional and quantificational aspects of
argumentation, of a pattern of argument.
It might be pointed out that explaining deductive
patterns of argument in natural language is itself open
to my objections about giving students an inappropriate
sense of determinateness. My general position is saved,
however, by some considerations about pedagogical
emphasis. To familiarize students with propositional
and predicate calculus takes a considerable length of
time - perhaps a minimum of a month - and must be done
in a systematic fashion to be effective: it cannot be
done piecemeal. Explaining deductive patterns in
natural language can be much quicker, and need not be
organized as a block of instructional time; it can
instead be interspersed with other material and
activities. As a result, the inappropriate attitudinal
messages which I fear induce the expectation of
determinateness become both fewer and more diffuse. The
determinate aspects of argument assessment lose their
monolithic character as evaluative paradigms.
Since these aspects can be explained without formal
techniques, and since formal techniques bring with them
their own problems, it seems to me clear that we must
take the informal approach. In this way, too, we shall
further the important programme of enabling critical
thinking to throw off the shackles of its deductive
roots. Neither this result nor this general aim will be
surprising to many teachers of critical thinking, but I
hope to have provided some insight into their
justification, and a word of warning to those who have
not yet considered them.
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