INTRODUCTION TO LOGICAL THINKING

Involves philosophically controversial concepts; need to understand foundations; inadequate treatment in textbooks

(a) A meaningless string or words is not a statement [1] (b) Distinguishing statements from other meaningful word strings (sentences). [2, 3] (c) Interchangeability of statement & assertion. (d) Statements convey propositions (subject + predicate). (e) Every statement is either true or false.

Truth is whatever everyone agrees to.

(which we met last week): according to this view, there is no objective truth independent of what we think or believe; we each have our own truths, which are true simply by virtue of our taking them to be true. Hence, there is no point in trying to determine whether something is true, because it can be true for me but not for you. The obvious objection to this is that it is hard to take seriously, because it allows the existence of contradictory states of affairs. it is a contradiction.

According to this view, there is objective truth, and it is whatever the facts are. So if one friend claims Agnes is the coordinator, and the other claims she is not, the truth depends on the way the world is. In this theory, truth is simply whatever is actually the case, whatever state of affairs actually obtains in reality. By contrast, a statement or assertion is FALSE if it claims something that is not the case. Notice that this is not a question about how we know

Most statements are contingent: they may be true or false, and this depends on (is contingent upon) the way the world is, the facts. (contingent truths are sometimes called “synthetic” truths).

(i) Necessary truths - tautologies (fr. Greek "tautos" = "identical") (sometimes also called “analytic truths” or “truisms”) Statements which are (a) "true by definition" [6] or (b) true by virtue of logical structure [7], & cannot possibly be false, because to deny them would be self-contradictory. (ii) Self-contradictions Statements which are necessarily false (some say incoherent) - cannot possibly be true. A self-contradiction is the negation of a tautology. [8]

(informative, interrogative (asking questions), expressive. (indicating how we feel), directive (giving instructions/commands), persuasive, performative. (e.g., “I now pronounce you husband and wife”) è the concept of “speech acts” [we do things with language]. In evaluating arguments, we're concerned with statements or assertions. This is called the informative function. Language is used to convey information, to make statements, to claim things (whether they are true or false).

(a) In language, the meaning of words (the connection between words and what they stand for) is largely conventional (i.e., it is arbitrary, based on agreement within a language-speaking community). Piaget showed that it takes young children a while to realize this (e.g., they think that the sun must be called the “sun”, because the name is part of the object; they think that “train” is an example of a long word). (b) Therefore, in language, meaning is relational (i.e., it involves a three-term relation between a word [the signifier], the referent of the word [the signified], and the person who uses the word to refer to the referent). For example, the word “sun” is used to refer to the yellow object in the sky by an English speaker. (c) There are two dimensions of meaning: (i) denotation = everything referred to by a term (ii) connotation = characteristics and associations (e.g., many words have emotional connotations). (d) Words with positive connotations = euphemisms (from Greek eu = “well”+ phemi = “to speak”).

(1) Be neither too broad nor too narrow (2) Avoid circularity. (3) Avoid being purely negative. (4) Avoid figurative language. (5) Avoid obscure or needlessly technical language. (b) Special definitional problems for psychology (1) Many terms used in psychology are controversial and “theoretically loaded” (e.g., “anxiety”, “defense mechanism”, “self-concept”). (2) Many terms in psychology involve different/technical meanings of common terms (e.g., “reliability”, “validity”, “reinforcement”).

More than one available interpretation. There are two types of ambiguity: (i) semantic ambiguity = a word or phrase has more than one meaning (e.g., “He put the address away in his briefcase”) (ii) syntactic ambiguity = the pattern or arrangement of words allows for more than one interpretation of the whole sentence (e.g., “A lecture will be given on deviant sexual behaviour in Lecture Theatre 1”). (b) Equivocation - exploiting ambiguity - switching between two meanings (e.g., Archie equivocates on “cheating” and “being honest”)

: unclear or fuzzy boundary for a word (e.g. the word “bald” is vague, because it’s not clear where non-baldness ends and baldness begins).

A category that is very broad - e.g., overgeneral terms can be exploited to produce the "Barnum Effect" (“one size fits all” e.g., horoscopes in newspapers). (From P. T. Barnum: “A good circus should have a little something for everybody” and “There’s a sucker born every minute”).

Oversimplifying and stereotyping (e.g., “disabled”, “gay”, “refugee”)

- naming x explains x (e.g., acrophobia explains fear of heights) (g) Reification (or hypostatization) = “thing-ification” - using language to invent "things" (e.g. “an ability”, “intelligence”, “self-esteem”); turning something that is not a thing into a thing (just because we have a noun for it).