Logic Is a Language that Goes Beyond the Limits of Individual People
This article is not only for professional communicators, as everybody communicates and needs to distinguish between what is an “opinion” and what is a “fact”
Let’s get started with a simple rule:
An opinion applies to some, and a fact applies to all.
People with a mathematical background should easily see where logic comes into play; it enters because of the couple “some/every.”
It may sound paradoxical, but the critical communication point is never the content nor the number of people who agree with it.
Suppose ten people agree on statement A and millions agree with statement B. In that case, it is reasonable to rely on statement B. Anyway, statement B is still an opinion if at least one person can demonstrate that statement B might be wrong.
Instead, if “every” person must agree with statement B, then B is a fact.
The power of logic is in that it is brave enough to speak strictly and formally around that apparently inoffensive word “every.”
How many times have you heard some people who were highly convinced about an opinion say:
Everybody would agree with me!
In this case, the usage of “every” has no foundation, but it is interesting how common it is as it means that most people instinctively need to rely on universal truths, even without knowing what logic is.
That’s humans!
At the beginning of the opposition between “some” and “every”
Following the great recap of Aristotle’s logic by Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Aristotle’s logical works contain the earliest formal study of logic that we have.
No matter that modern logic revised the entire foundation of logic, at the beginning of our fight between opinions and facts, there is Aristotle’s “Square of oppositions,” where another paramount little word is the battle’s field between “every” and “some”: “not.”
“Every” and “some” are opposite thanks to “not.”
What does “not” do? It excludes. It separates things — “every” and “some” things — into different categories.
Let’s look at an example.
Every man is alive.
This statement puts every man into the “alive” category. Now the question is: what is the opposite statement between the following two ones?
1. Every man is not alive.
2. Some man is not alive.
The “Square of oppositions” answers: “Some man is not alive;” this means that the opposite of a fact is not another fact, but the existence of an exception, a sort of black swan which denies the fact “Every swan is white.”
Why logic goes beyond people’s limits?
Aristotle lived about twenty-four centuries ago, experiencing a different world than where we now live. At this time, society, religion, politics, and shared beliefs were rooted in ideas that we today regard as ancient and distant or… totally crazy!
Nevertheless, Aristotle’s logic is still valid.
Modern logic refined and corrected it, but the foundation was already there.
Why?
Because logic, since the beginning, has been a meta-language, meaning a language that describes the language.
The nature of logic is such that it is a pure “context” that surrounds the “content” of a communication, and that’s the magic. We, as human beings, tend to focus on “content” because our identity is content, and we value our identity the most. Yet, identity is limiting because it is an everything-else-excluding category.
So, the logic goes beyond the human identity and, because of that, is a path toward inclusion. On the other hand, communication is the inclusion of the listener or reader into the horizon of the speaker or writer.
Conclusions
It’s now clear what is the people’s limit: their identity.
Obviously, we are not guilty of that, as we need our identities!
So, what?
It’s a balance between identity and beyond identity, and logic is both. In fact, logic is a human invention and, simultaneously, a rational standpoint independent of men.
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