Delusional. This is a valid and sound argument:
P1: No amphibians nurse their young with milk produced by mammary glands.
P2: All frogs are amphibians.
C: Therefore, no frogs nurse their young with milk produced by mammary glands.
EAE-2
I already did that.
I did not say it was not a valid sound argument. It is a scientific argument based on the objective verifiable evidence concerning whether or not amphibians nurse their young with milk produced from mammary glands.
Your argument involves scientific questions such as:
How are amphibians defined?
Do amphibians have mammary glands?
Are frogs amphibians?
Do frogs have mammary glands?
I presented definitions for formal logic and scientific arguments and their differences from a reliable academic source.
You have provided nothing.
Alright... so I think I see where there are points of disagreement between you two here, and I kinda can see where both of you are coming from...
So this might ultimately be a bad idea but I'm going to attempt to go through all of this and try to bring a scholarly approach to this here.
First as to Nous's amphibian variant of the classical Socrates/Man/Mortal argument,
yes, Shunya is right. There are a
lot of holes in that argument and gaps and assumptions made.
The interesting thing is these holes were never initially noticed in Classical Logic until George Boole formalized logic into a mathematics-like format. When we work off of that we see there are a
lot of things that need to be defined in the frog/amphibian/mammaries argument before we can parse it logically.
We need to define what mammaries are, what it means to have mammaries, what it means to feed your young from mammaries. We even need logical definitions for things like "young" and "milk" in order to do this, not to mention definitions of what it means to be an "amphibian".
Now, so I am not misunderstood, I am not saying that a logical argument for this point about frogs
cannot be made, it's just that with modern understandings of logic, we'd need a whole
host of new "premises" or axioms and arguments to be able to build to that conclusion. It'd be a
very intensive task to try to write such a thing without any assumptive shortcuts!!
For an argument to be sound, it must be valid. "Valid" simply means "truth-preserving".
This is
super wrong. Validity/truth is independent of soundness. They are different qualities. For full description of this see my last post to Nous.
Now as to "logical deduction versus scientific methods" thing happening here:
First to Shunya: Formal logic
can be used as a part of scientific methods. Honestly I'm not sure whether you are stating that formal logic is just different from scientific methods or if you are saying they are
wholly different. I can't tell from your posts which of the two you are saying, it seems at least to me to be unclear.
If you are arguing for the latter, though, I'd have to say that is incorrect, as formal logic can play a large part in the scientific process, and certain aspects of scientific experimentation use formal logic as part of proofs. If you are stating the former, then I do agree for the most part but it's not exactly clear from your posts if this is what you meant to say, whether formal logic is different or wholly separate from scientific methods.
For Nous, here's the thing: Logic can be used to build scientific conclusions but we first need
axioms to build from. And these axioms can be either correct or incorrect. If correct, and our logic sound, then our conclusions will be correct, but if our axioms are false the conclusion is uncertain.
Ultimately in the field of the sciences we need to derive our axioms from outside of logic, usually from
observation. We
can build axioms from logic, but then we need
more axioms to come to the conclusion to validate our original axioms. Ultimately it comes down to
observation in what typically builds an axiom.
Like taking your axiom "No amphibian feeds their young milk from mammary glands", we ultimately need to verify this through observation. Only by observing that, yes, no amphibian does this thing can we verify that the logic of "if X is an amphibian then X does not have mammaries" is sound.
That may be what Shunya is getting at here, that formal logic
alone couldn't build this argument to meet this conclusion. Alternately,
if Shunya is stating that this is not
at all formal logic, he is incorrect, as logic is a
part of how we reach the conclusion of your argument, but only with other scientific methods like
observation do we make it to the conclusion validly and soundly.
There
have been some people who tried to prove the existence of things using
only formal logic with nothing else, but they weren't able to get far with that
. Rene Descartes only managed to prove that he himself exists with his "Congito Ergo Sum" argument, and that basic shapes existed with the fact that basic shapes are simply abstracts existing wholly by their own definition.
And even through his proof of his own existence, he was relying on his
observation of his own thoughts to build up the axiom "I think".
So even
that wasn't a
purely logical deduction.
It seems to me almost like the argument here is due to miscommunication. Either of you feel free to correct me if this assumption is wrong, but it seems to me almost like Shunya is arguing that there is
more than just formal logic needed to build to a conclusion, and he assumes Nous is arguing against this point, and Nous assumes Shunya is arguing that formal logic has
no part
at all in forming a conclusion, and is arguing against that point. Is this theory correct, or am I mistaken in this assumption??
