The Logic Fog
December 18th, 2008 by Gary Hipworth

Knowledge, which seeks to know reality, must be a total.

There is only one universe, one world. Some scientists have theories about parallel universes, but I can only relate to the one universe that confronts me every new day – this one!

A human being therefore needs to build up in his mind a total world view. How does one do this? One must always hold the context of one’s knowledge and work at integrating all one’s knowledge into a whole system of beliefs that are consistent, rational and true with one another.

So one man’s knowledge is always in the process of expanding, accumulating, because everything in reality is interrelated and one person can never know it all.

Man uses his reasoning ability to establish whether something is true or false. Truth is the recognition of reality. Something is true if it can be integrated without contradiction into a total belief system. Evidence is testimony or facts tending to prove or disprove any conclusion.

We are using our reasoning ability all the time. What is its method? It is called logic.

There are two forms of logic – inductive logic and deductive logic.

Inductive logic relies on a general conclusion from observing the same facts repeated without contradiction: It goes from the particular to the general. I observe the sun rising every day in the eastern sky for 365 days in a row. I conclude that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. In everyday usage, I know that I can rely on night following day with some kind of certainty. Well that's a relief!

Deductive logic works the other way around. It goes from the general to the particular. “All humans will die” is a general theory that is seen to be true for all time. I am a human being. Therefore I will die. If the general theory (or initial premise) is true, then the deduction to the particular must be true also.

But we come back full circle to a critical fact!

Man is fallible. Human knowledge is limited. All knowledge is held in relationship with other knowledge. Conceptual knowledge is based on logic within a specific context. 

Human knowledge is not, and could never know everything!

What about words? Surely they won't let us down?

A word is a visual-auditory symbol that evolved in part as a labelling system to describe common features of our environment. Logic and linear or sequential thinking are favoured by our education system as the best way to test abilities.

It is no surprise then that we find that knowledge based on concepts dominates our whole way of thinking and learning. The essential structure of language is one of separation. As a child we learn to use nouns to identify separate things and verbs to identify separate actions.  

These language tools are useful instruments for survival when it is necessary to distinguish between a brown snake that could sink its fangs into me and poison me or a relatively harmless piece of rope.

However, this way of thinking comes with a heavy price. It is a valiant attempt to make our world certain and predictable by trying to fit the constant flux and flow of living processes and the actual oneness of reality into static solid and separate conceptual boxes, for example: 
 

STRAIGHT LINE , ONE THING AT A TIME, CAUSE & EFFECT, IGNORES THE CONTEXT! 
  
Where did the ice-cream come from. The corner shop? Where did it go to? Is that the end of the story? Did the ice-cream disappear into Simon’s intestines, never to be seen or heard of again? I think not.

We both know where that ice-cream ended up, or, does it keep going, round and round, but in a different form?

The structure of language and its content reinforces the way that we see the world. We deal with one thing after another, with cause and effect close in time and space.

We don’t see the totality of reality.

Our view is a partial, fixed, fragmented perspective. What happened to decaying, corroding, melting, burning, breaking and transforming processes?

The normal and traditional logical way of human knowing cannot express or understand the total changing network of interconnected relationships, cyclic events and paradoxes which is one reality. It is literally left speechless.

This the reason that we also need the insight or total way of seeing reality. They complement one another.

Now why don't we have these things explained in our traditional education?

Well, it would be pretty embarrassing if teachers had to own up to the weaknesses of the human knowledge system as well as its strengths. Careers are at stake. Perhaps our whole civilisation would be at stake?  

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