Rongqing Dai

Abstract

Logic is the foundation of our thinking as intelligent beings, and therefore it is often assumed that mentally sound humans largely follow correct logic in their daily lives. Past philosophers have even likened human logical thought processes to a mirror reflecting nature. However, human logical practices in daily life are far from the true reflection of nature. This article aims to explore the nature of logic in human daily life, a topic that has been largely neglected by academia.

Keywords: Life Logic, Reality, Logical Connection, Irregularity, Formal Law of Logic

1. Brief Introduction

Logic is the foundation of our thinking as an intelligent species, and for that reason it is often assumed that humans of sober mind by and large follow correct logic in their daily life. Since ancient times, philosophers and logicians have primarily focused on how human logic takes its forms and how logical thinking and argumentation are correctly performed. The self-evident premise of the Kantian^[[1]] and Hegelian^[[2]] phenomenology is that the human thought process is a mirror reflecting nature, or in other words, human logic is a true reflection of natural logic unless the fact was deliberately distorted. The concept of human logic reflecting natural logic originated with Aristotle—the philosophical giant who first systematically studied logic, but Kantian and Hegelian phenomenology shifted their focus from natural logic itself to how human reflection of nature is formed. At the same time, contrary to serious scholastic studies, human history has never lacked exploiters, such as sophists or professional charlatans, who exploit or even instigate others to exploit loopholes in human logic and the weaknesses in human thought for personal gain.

However, the general logical practices of human beings in daily life are neither a true reflection of nature envisioned by Kant and Hegel, nor do they necessarily resemble the behavior of sophists or professional charlatans. They are usually just irregular.

Traditional orthodox philosophy has criticized erroneous logic in many ways, especially in Aristotle’s works^[[3]] where criticism of others constitutes a large part of the content; but those criticisms are mostly focused on specific manifestations of erroneous logic rather than a systematic analysis and critique of the universal characteristics and various roots of logical chaos in life. Therefore, while they may raise awareness and resistance to specific logical errors, they fail to help people truly understand the more prevalent errors in daily life and their root causes, thus failing to correct the logical chaos in people’s daily lives at the source.

2. Form of Logical Connection and Cause for False Logic

A normal logical expression contains a variety of elements that are familiar to us. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the syllogism discussed by Aristotle ^[[4]]. A simple example is: “dogs are quadrupeds; Ronnie is a dog, so Ronnie is a quadruped”. Since Aristotle, the study of syllogisms has focused on correct logic, while incorrect logical combinations have been used as examples of errors. For example, if someone says, “Dogs are all quadrupeds, Ronnie is not a dog, so Ronnie must be a quadruped,” this can be used as an example of error.

However, most people might be surprised to find that the vast majority of language expressions in real life do not strictly follow correct logic. It might be even more surprisingly, we can not only accept logically flawed expressions, but also extract correct information from them in most cases (even though what people think is correct may actually be incorrect, and is merely what they believe to be correct).

2.1. Forms of errors

Logical errors occur in life for various reasons, and therefore take many forms. Sometimes people could even deliberately use flawed logic to achieve their goals, but more often it's unconscious.

Deliberately using flawed logic constitutes lying. Some lies are for self-defense, while others are intended to mislead others. Although both are ways of deceiving others, there are still some differences between them.

2.1.1. Logic of thinking and logic of communication

Logic of communication, or linguistic logic, as discussed here, refers to the logic employed in verbal communication. Clearly, verbal communication is only one part of human thought processes; therefore, linguistic logic is not the entirety of logical thinking, but merely a portion of it.

However, for adults, logical thinking is significantly influenced or limited by the language available to them, and thus the linguistic logic reflects the logic of thinking to certain extent. Even when there is no need for direct communication with others, in solitary thinking, the process of thought, especially complex thought, still relies heavily on language.

Given that the difference between communication needs and thinking needs, we can divide linguistic logic into two types: communicative linguistic logic and thought-only linguistic logic. This distinction emphasizes the difference between the characteristics of the logical form of language arising from the need for external expression in communication and the characteristics of the logical form of language in solitary thought.

2.1.2. Habitual logical mistakes

For adults, whether intentional or not, the use of flawed logic is often driven by habit, which in most cases stems from the influence of social and cultural environments.

2.1.3. Intentional and unconscious logical mistakes

There is often no clear dividing line between intentional and unconscious logical mistakes. On the one hand, even if people initially use flawed logic to deceive others, they often begin to believe their own lies after a while. On the other hand, the reason for people to intentionally use flawed logic to deceive others is often because they are subconsciously influenced by that flawed logic; therefore, although they consciously know that such logic is wrong, they might have subconsciously become accustomed to thinking in that flawed way.

In life, we often observe situations where the same person can readily use opposite logic to answer questions, engage in dialogue, and even deliver eloquent speeches in different situations. This phenomenon is not limited to political figures but is prevalent in everyday life. Many non-political figures also habitually exhibit this behavior. Moreover, not only people with this habit are often more enthusiastic about socializing, but also their illogical statements could often help them to gain acceptance and even closeness from others in social situations. Nevertheless, this kind of people are often criticized by others as deliberately saying things they themselves don't believe in order to fool others; however, the truth is probably that while a considerable number of these people do have a conditioned reflex to make lies, many more others just genuinely believe that their flawed logic is correct in different situations.

A common characteristic of these people (at least the majority of them) is that they don't really care whether their logic is correct or not; what they care about most, or reflexively strive for, is how to express themselves using the best acceptable logic in the relevant context or with the relevant group of people in different situations.

3. Expression of incomplete logic and the extraction of its meaning

Compared to the previous example of "dogs are quadrupeds, Ronnie is a dog, therefore Ronnie is a quadruped" with a complete logical structure, many expressions in everyday life are logically incomplete. This is mainly because the language used in daily life is usually much more complex than this example, and thus people often cannot state the basic logical elements one by one, but instead use various methods to simplify language. Conciseness in language mainly takes two forms: one is the use of conceptual vocabulary (notions), and the other is the omission within a specific linguistic context.

3.1. Conceptual vocabulary for conciseness

The formation of conceptual vocabulary is the common approach to make linguistic expressions concise, formal, and rigorous. This conciseness primarily exists in natural language. Concepts that are generally accepted within a certain group are mainly learned and mastered through their uses in communications, instruction from teachers, parents, or others, transmission by various media, and the assistance of a special tool—the dictionary. With conceptual vocabulary, the extraction of the meaning of complex concepts in natural language follows a tree-like structure of abstract meaning, drawing complex meanings layer by layer from simple words.

Formal languages used in computer programming do not have conceptual vocabulary; instead, they have structures such as function, subroutine, procedure, classes, objects, etc.

Regarding how AI processes concepts in human language, I asked AI and received the following response:

[AI stores human language concepts not as literal text, but as numerical representations called embeddings within massive, multidimensional vector spaces. Through neural networks, AI identifies patterns and relationships in data, allowing related words (e.g., "dog" and "puppy") to cluster together, mapping semantic meaning and contextual usage.]

It seems that AI cannot form language concepts like humans.

3.2. Linguistic context for conciseness

The main role of linguistic context in language conciseness lies in the fact that people can construct their expressions based on implicit premises that are mutually understood and therefore self-evident within a specific linguistic environment.

There are two important reasons for people to utilize linguistic context. Firstly, if a sentence is long and complex, people often tend to consciously or habitually omit some premises they consider self-evident for ease of expression. Secondly, even with simple content, people could prefer to omit some content that is generally understood and therefore self-evident, in order to save effort.

The aforementioned use of simple conceptual vocabulary to express complex linguistic content is a special kind of utilization of implicit premises. There are two reasons for this: First, a sentence containing a certain word is an incomplete logical expression based on implicit premises for a reader who does not understand the meaning of the word, while such implicit premises become self-evident for a reader who understands the meaning of the word. Second, it was mentioned earlier that the extraction of the meaning of some complex concepts in natural language follows a tree structure of abstract meaning, but this does not necessarily mean that the tree structure itself is complete. When compiling dictionaries, people may introduce omissions that they understand but not everyone knows, thus becoming an incomplete logical expression with omissions in a specific context.

3.3. Repetitive operations and psychological fatigue

The simpler a statement, the more implicit premises it may contain. This is because simple contents mostly consist of basic daily conversations, and much of that kind of conversations involves contents used repeatedly day after day. Repetitive operations lead to psychological fatigue, and driven by this fatigue, people are more inclined to use implicit premises.

A key characteristic of the said psychological fatigue is that it is not limited to a single moment’s feeling but has a long-term effect. That is, even if someone and those around do not mention a certain concept on a particular day, if that concept is considered self-evident due to frequent use among the people in the same community, then that person is very likely to omit that concept as an implicit premise to avoid psychological fatigue.

3.4. Discussion

A fundamental skill in human linguistic communication is the extraction of the speaker’s complete meaning from incomplete logical statements riddled with implicit premises. This human ability is defective, primarily due to two reasons. First, not everyone understands the meaning of all the concepts and words used in everyone else’s expressions; second, not everyone knows the meanings that are considered self-evident by those familiar with the context. For example, it is said that a technique used in war to identify infiltrating enemies is to say “Everyone crouch down” in a dialect or special code language that the enemies don't understand, thus exposing the enemies who haven't crouched.

The level of ability to extract complete information from incomplete logical structures is generally referred to as the strength of one's comprehension.

4. The Apparent Formal Law of Logic

As mentioned earlier, people not only habitually make logical errors, but also can tolerate and accept flawed logic from others, and are often able to extract (at least hypothetically) complete information from logically incomplete statements. A key reason for this to happen is that to ordinary people the most fundamental characteristic of logic is not the correctness of the content constructed by the logic, but rather the presence of the key elements to form the logic; we can call this fundamental characteristic the apparent formal law of logic. Because of that, people could often tolerate something like “dogs are quadrupeds; Ronnie is a dog, so Jonny is a quadruped” for its apparent complete logical structure.

4.1. The role of the formal law of logic in logical irregularity in life

The formal law of logic is crucial in the logical irregularity of life. An important reason why life is full of flawed logic and why some people who habitually use flawed logic can gain trust and affection is that most people’s appreciation of others’ speech (especially expressions that deviate from the language they constantly repeat in life) is primarily based on the logical structure of the other person’s speech, rather than its strict meaning.

If what the other person says isn’t substantially meaningful, most people won't take it too seriously in many situations; they either fill in the blanks themselves or simply let go themselves without trying to grasp its full meaning. Especially in formal settings, when listening to someone of high status give a speech, even if the speaker's logic is full of flaws, ordinary people often not only don't confront them directly, but even adopt “the emperor’s new clothes” mentality, earnestly trying to understand or speculate on the deeper meaning hidden behind the speaker's logical flaws.

4.2. Fake logical connections

With the preceding groundwork laid, we can now introduce a key argument of this paper: a common form of flawed logic in everyday life is with the statement “because A, therefore B” while there is no meaningful causal relationship between A and B at all.

People often don’t question this logical fallacy. Even worse, not only could listeners find it agreeable, but the speaker themselves may also feel their statement is reasonable because it sounds good and natural. The key point here is that in this situation, both the speaker and the listener are primarily focused on the logical form of the expression, rather than whether the meaning expressed corresponds to reality. Of course, this situation arises only when the spoken words are somewhat remote from simple everyday contexts like “a bowl of noodles with minced meat sauce,” and the causal relationship doesn’t immediately alter the surrounding environment. Once the listeners’ own interests are affected, they generally would immediately notice the error in the statement.

4.3. Acceptance of errors with understanding

In daily life, when people hear others use the wrong word or express themselves inaccurately, unless it's a very formal occasion involving a very important topic, listeners often try to guess the speaker's intended meaning. This is especially true if the error isn't too awkward, or the speaker is someone worthy of respect or needs to save face, and the speaker does not make the same error annoyingly too often. When errors occur in writing, unless the author can be found and it's necessary, people generally will only guess the author's intended meaning.

When people do the guessing, no matter for oral or for written expressions, they do it not only by finding the most likely answers according to language habits or logical structure, like AI would do, but also based on their own common errors.

Of course, it doesn't mean people will tolerate others’ mistakes indefinitely. It’s also human nature to nitpick others’ errors. Whether to point out the mistake or accept it with understanding would depend on the context, content of the conversation, and the nature and severity of the error.

4.4. Flawed logic in life and the need for conversation

Some popular science articles often offer a one-sided explanation for interpersonal conversation: people talk to each other to convey information or exchange ideas. However, in reality, the purpose of conversation is often conversation itself, with the exchange of information or ideas becoming a byproduct. When talking for the sake of talking, people are often more tolerant of superficial illogical statements or even flawed logic. Inconsistencies in everyday logic or errors in expression could even sometimes be deliberately used to mask the true purpose of the conversation. Of course, this doesn't mean people would completely disregard the rationality and acceptability of the content. On the other hand, once a conversation begins, the desire for the information conveyed and the ideas exchanged through the content can easily replace the initial intention of simply finding random topics to chat about and becomes the primary purpose of the conversation.

4.5. The complexity of life logic of adults

Generally, as people age, their intelligence becomes more mature. Correspondingly, we might assume that the logic of adult expression should be easier to grasp than that of younger people. However, in reality, we often find that the logic of conversations between adults is not as clear and easy to comprehend as that between younger people. Adults are usually more concerned with etiquette and less willing to directly express their thoughts, preferring to subtly probe the other person's true intentions through their reactions, especially between two unfamiliar adults. This is not only because adults are more concerned about the negative consequences of making the other person uncomfortable with inappropriate words, but also because life experience tells adults that everyone's life is a complex story that cannot be simply described in words within a short period of time. In fact, we usually cannot view an adult's smile in the same way we view a child's smile, because the meaning behind an adult's smile, especially the smile of a political figure, can be extremely complex.

4.6. The role of interest in ensuring logical correctness

Although people generally don't have high standards for the rigor of logic in daily life, they would immediately become meticulous about the logical consistency of language (whether spoken or written) when the personal interests of one party in a conversation are at stake. Therefore, interest is the most effective factor in ensuring logical coherence in daily life.

5. The Extension of Everyday Life Logic to Formal Contexts

The logical irregularities in everyday life discussed above are not limited to informal conversations or private, solitary thoughts. They manifest naturally in all aspects of public life, including speeches by public figures, pronouncements or instructions from various levels of officials at meetings, journalistic interviews, classroom lectures, and even the creation and writing of formal articles and books.

The discussion of this writing begins with logical irregularities in everyday life, referring to these logical phenomena as “life logic”, not because these logical phenomena exist only in informal conversations, but because, firstly, logical expression in so-called formal settings is merely a part of logical phenomena in life; and secondly, the logical phenomena discussed here are those overlooked by philosophers and pseudo-philosophers throughout history. Therefore, it is necessary to give them an appropriate name, and the broad scope of the word "life" is perfectly suited to the logical phenomena discussed here.

6. Logical Chaos of Everyday Life and Kant's Pure Reason

Human world is disordered in many ways largely due to the general logical chaos in life, and the logical irregularities and illogical manners in the social communications as discussed above make a big contribution to the logical chaos in life.

In traditional orthodox philosophy, Kant’s discourse on pure reason is undoubtedly most relevant to the logical chaos of everyday life. This is because a fundamental characteristic of logical chaos in everyday life is that the content it conveys is often detached from reality, and the characteristic activity of the Kantian pure reason lies precisely in its detachment from empirical foundations and its self-construction of fictitious things.

However, regrettably, not only is it difficult to find connections between the pure reason Kant addresses and general life logic in the papers of so-called Kantian scholars, but Kant himself also did not explicitly mention the logic of everyday life in his “Critique of Pure Reason”. The reasons for this could be twofold: firstly, Kant had a political goal in writing that masterpiece, which was certainly not aimed at the life logic of the populace; secondly, Kant's expression of his goal was so subtle that even professional Kantian scholars rarely recognized it (or at least seldom mentioned it); and more seriously, the object that Kant wanted to criticize through the critique of pure reason was not itself something that arose out of thin air from what he believed to be pure reason. In other words, although the phenomenon of illusory logic pieced together by pure reason detached from reality, as mentioned by Kant, truly exists in general, the object he actually addressed are not of the nature he was criticizing. Furthermore, the phenomena of truly detached logical expressions found everywhere in life, as discussed in this paper, are not of interest to him and therefore are not mentioned in his text.

Therefore, although Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” does indeed touch upon the chaotic state of logic in everyday life discussed in this article, in the past two hundred years, his discussions have not systematically helped people understand the logical chaos in life.

7. Final Remarks

As people around the world are busy pursuing various goals with different utilitarian values by applying specific knowledge suitable for each particular goal, they often overlook an important fact: all human activities are fundamentally connected through profound underlying logic, just as ancient philosophers believed. Accordingly, the understanding of problems in one area of social life could be impacted by the knowledge in some apparently irrelevant area. For example, when people are confused by the mess left by 20th-century physicists in theoretical physics, it would be greatly beneficial if they could better understand how human civilization functions as a whole; when people are confused by a certain kind of global economic chaos, it would be greatly beneficial if they could understand how the principle of fairness influences human behavior at the very fundamental level.

However, in order to better understand general human activities beyond the turf limited by professional jargons of each profession, a basic prerequisite would be a better understanding of how people think and communicate in casual everyday life beyond the territories confined by professional boundaries but common to every person everywhere. This underscores the importance of the discussion in this article.

******

If we imagine a group of extraterrestrial aliens studying Earth's civilization in a laboratory, then the topic of this article would be likely part of their analysis for it concerns a fundamental characteristic of humanity as a civilization. This topic has deeply resonated with me over the years. I’ve wanted to write about it since long time ago, but for various reasons, I was not able to. Thanks to God’s guidance, I’ve finally completed a preliminary discussion of this topic now.

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[[1]]Kant, I. 1781. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Jonathan Bennett. 2016. Cambridge University Press.

[[2]]Hegel, G.W.F. (1807). The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by J. B. Baillie 1910, provided by www.marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

[[3]]Aristotle. (350BC). Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Provided by The Internet Classics Archive. Available at http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/metaphysics.html

[[4]]Aristotle (350 B.C.E). Prior Analytics. Translated by A. J. Jenkinson. Retrieved from https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/prior.html