Prelude: Creating The Logic Engine

Gathering the Resources

    Despite the complete absence of Logic in modern Socio-Political rhetoric, there are no shortages of resources about the Categorical Syllogisms on which the Logic Engine is to be based. This is not due to any particular quality of greatness in our current world-society at all. This is entirely the legacy of the better men and women of the classical, renaissance, and enlightenment eras who toiled tirelessly to ensure that the resources for this critical tool be available for all generations to come. 

    The feckless university systems of this world have almost completely eliminated it from nearly all courses of study and thus condensed it to one specific type of 'humanities' class which is entirely optional and which glosses over the subject of logic to make room for the impossibly mammoth amount of corollary subjects and personalities which must be covered in order to justify a course named "Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics".

    Here's a list of resources which you can use to educate yourself on the forum for logical debate known as the Syllogism or (more specifically) the Categorical Proposition:

• http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/syllogismterm.htm
• http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/general/bldef_categoricalprop.htm
• http://wikieducator.org/Rules_and_Fallacies_for_Categorical_Syllogisms
• http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/philosophy/logic-fallacies.htm
• http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/philosophy/ph-4.syllogisms.3.pdf

    The last one is a list of all of the 256 possible combinations of Categorical syllogism. Once you learn how to read that last page, you can merely 'plug-in' the form of any argument and determine whether-or-not a syllogistic argument is invalid. This is important, because an Invalid argument can never be True; it can only ever be 'undetermined' at best. 

    If an arguer cannot phrase his argument in a Valid form, the argument is worthless as far as decision-making is concerned. This is what the Logic-Engine is all about. Here's an example, if you are going to send a county to war and kill hundreds of thousands of people in the process, you must make that decision based upon an argument which is, at the very least, valid in form. The argument may turn out to be False. However that is not the fault of the arguer per se, rather, that is the fault of the premises used to make the argument. In the world of decision making, the entity or process which determines the truth-value of a premise is completely separate from the entity which makes the decision. This is incontrovertibly True in the world of Executive Government. The President does not go into Iran personally and collect intel about Iran's theoretical quest to declare a nuclear war on America. In fact, the President will likely never even meet any of the people who did. 

    The executor must trust the efforts of the information gatherers she uses first, then trust the sources the information-gatherers cite indirectly. This can never occur in any other fashion lest the gatherer and source be one in the same person; in this case organizational association through the likes of research institutes and corporations are completely irrelevant due to distortions in interpretation and observer-bias which is introduced, willingly or not, by each agent in turn -- remember the telephone game?

    Once you separate the scientific process of premise-proving from the Syllogistic process of decision-making, you are halfway to the point of creating an entirely new form of human governance: the reign of the categorical syllogism. This is because one can take any form of argument and evaluate it using the categorical syllogism. We can trust the categorical syllogism because it is one of the founding structures used to create of all modern mathematics. Every modern structure, tool, or organization has been influenced or completely sired by mathematics and the scientific method. If you refute the consistency of the categorical syllogism, you might as well refute all science. Give-up the computer you are reading this on, the phone, camera, television, gaming set, car, watch, air-conditioning unit, building-you-live-in, justice system which protects you, and government whose freedoms you enjoy. If you don't trust the categorical syllogism you can't explain the presence of any (and much much more) of these things in your life; because they were all founded upon it.

    Simply put: the categorical syllogism and it's children: mathematics, philosophy and science are the foundation of civilization as we know it. To reject it is to return to the bronze-age. 

    The task before us is simply to take the tools before us and formalize them into a public forum and private decision-making system which will be understandable to all members of society and with which we can build a new more logical form of governance.

   The way I will contribute to this is to create a computer program which allows us to feed arguments into it and make determinations of validity or invalidity. 

    I would also like to create a public forum and invite pundits to participate. We can then use logic to determine the course of human activity. 

    In short, if we had used the Logic Engine when Bush Jr. was proposing a war in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. The Logic Engine is no mere curiosity of classical pre-science, it is the structure around which most or all of the world's greatest problems can be solved. However, the rule of might will forever dominate human affairs: The strongest entities will make the rules and write the histories. It is thus our charge to ensure that the strongest entities use the categorical syllogism as the basis for decision-making. It is thus our charge to ensure that the majority of human-beings use it. 

    Our work is cut-out for us and will not be completed in any living-persons lifetime. However, by merely pooling our resources and popularizing our efforts, we can and will succeed. The power of the syllogism is readily-apparent to all thinking-persons who use it. For now, we need only concern-ourselves with demonstrating that power for the world to see. 

Look for my breakdown of the Logic-Engine in the posts to come.