“Why study formal logic? Everyone knows how to reason.”
This is like asking
“Why study English grammar? Everyone knows how to speak.”
“Why study formal logic? Everyone knows how to reason.”
This is like asking
“Why study English grammar? Everyone knows how to speak.”
One of the enjoyable elements of learning Logic is when “the rubber meets the road!” The logical fallacies you learn in Introductory Logic are fallacies we all see every day!
Here I go over a very common fallacy: Circular Reasoning.
And here is a shorter clip on the “Ad Hominem” fallacy:
Sayers mentions film and radio. How much more relevant is her complaint in this day of TV and the Internet?
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. – Dorothy Sayers
A scene from the movie Get Smart makes for a good illustration of an exercise from lesson 28 in Intermediate Logic.