2nd post

One of the most interesting things to me, that we discussed in class were Aristotle's 3 laws of logic, or thought. Which is the study of reasoning. The first and most obvious is: identity. This is interpreted as: a subject is equal to the sum of it's predicates; or everything that is, exists/is. If it looks or feels like something, than it is that something.


The second is: non-contradiction. No predicate can be simultaneously attributed and denied to a subject. This is the law saying that nothing can both be and not be, in other words. If a flower is a rose and dead, it has to be that. If something is untrue, it will never be true. And the third is: excluded middle. Of every two contradictorily opposite predicates one must belong to every subject; or in other words, each and everything either is or is not.



Those are the three law's of logic, or thought. Logic was described as the art of non-contradictory identification. These law's lead to two thought categories. One is Induction, and the other is Deduction. Deduction basically says all men are mortal. And induction is like the sun always rises in the morning, therefor you know the sun will rise. I found a picture of the equations to go with Aristotle's laws:

As there are so many movies out there like A.I. and the Terminator series, I can’t help that I’ve always been a little paranoid about advances in technology. The idea of computers thinking for themselves, or should I say drawing their own conclusions and making their own decisions frightens me a bit. Therefore, my interest was definitely sparked by our discussion of logic during our previous lesson.

As we covered in class, logic comes down to deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning deals with known concepts, drawing conclusions with logic that can be proven. An example would be (1) All men are mortal (2) Socrates is a man (3) Socrates is mortal. Inductive reasoning deals with unknown concepts, thus using specific facts to come to a general conclusion. An example of this would be, lemons are edible, sour, yellow and juicy, therefore, I must be eating a lemon.

As we also learned, computers do not do well with inductive reasoning and this makes me feel more at ease, as it requires that technology is still dependent upon us. It is my fear however, that one-day technology will have mastered this form of logic. As of now, computers look at information as either true or false, however researchers of artificial intelligence are now working with “Fuzzy Logic,”

which allows the truth of a statement to be represented as a value between 0 and 1, rather than simply True (1) or False (0), which sounds a lot to me like inductive reasoning.

Let’s just say that I’m not too thrilled about this…