This chapter introduces a construction approach to logic education by explaining why such an approach is needed and how it should be implemented. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part argues that conventional logic education cannot teach people how to make a practical use of logic because what people commonly learn from conventional textbooks of logic can hardly correspond to the ordinary way of reasoning. The second part highlights how the construction approach can be integrated into people's ordinary way of reasoning by being practical and constructive in helping people use logic in what they do, such as writing an academic paper. It presents a general framework about how a logical relation can be constructed from scratch, and the three major steps of the construction.
TopIntroduction
The primary focus of logic studies lies in an inferential relation linking two kinds of statements within an argument, which are technically called the premise and conclusion of the argument. For example, you are waiting inside a subway station and observe that almost everyone who comes into the station has a wet umbrella. The observation reliably leads you to infer that it is raining outside even though you cannot directly observe what is happening outside. Thanks to the inferential relationship, you can come to know that it is raining outside based on the observation of wet umbrellas.
In one sense, the observation about the umbrellas can be regarded as the premise, because it is what makes you infer that it is raining outside, which is the conclusion in this sense. But in another sense, what has been observed can also be regarded as a conclusion or consequence, and it can be used as a base to find out the cause of the umbrellas’ being wet, which in this case is the rain falling outside. In either sense, the logical relation between premise and conclusion is the subject of the study of logic.
Since logic studies are essentially about the logical relation between premise and conclusion, an important task is to find out how the relation between the two statements can be constructed; i.e. how we could logically connect one statement with another from scratch? However, conventional studies of logic have been pursuing a slightly different path in the study of the logical relation. Although they are interested in how the premise and conclusion are related, they tend to look at the relation from the perspective of an “argument”, a top-down perspective that covers the totality of premise and conclusion. From that perspective, their interest lies primarily in the principles or rules that make the relation valid; i.e. what are the principles of validity that govern the relation?
The two different perspectives on how the statements are logically related lead to two rather different directions. One focuses on the development of analytical tools and techniques that could help to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments, whereas the other focuses on the development of practical pedagogies that could help people learn how to construct a logical relation from scratch. It is our ultimate intention in this paper to show that an understanding about what makes a logical relation valid does not amount to an understanding of how to construct a logical relation. And the reason is basically due to a gap between logical assessment and logical construction.
Conventional studies of logic can be basically categorized into two different approaches, formal approaches and informal approaches. Briefly, the formal approaches study the inferential relation between premise and conclusion by presenting the statements using some arbitrary symbols, whereas in the informal approaches premise and conclusion are presented using terms and sentences employed by natural languages. But despite the apparent differences in the way the premise and conclusion are presented, both formal and informal approaches share basically the same goal in the study of logic, which is nicely summarized by the definition of logic given by Irving Copi: “Logic is the study of the methods and principles used to distinguish correct from incorrect reasoning” (Copi and Cohen 2005, p. 4).
The definition of logic places the primary goal of the conventional approaches to the study of logic on the assessment of logical relations. Obviously, only through the assessment of logical relations, the rules and principles underlying the relations can be identified and used to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments.
Indeed, Aristotle’s categorical syllogism, which represents the glorious accomplishment of classical logic, was basically an assessment study about what the proper structure of an argument should be. Gottlob Frege’s quantification theory, which gave birth to modern mathematical logic, was specifically designed as an assessment tool for the study of the philosophy of mathematics. Even the informal approaches to logic studies, notably led by Howard Kahane, were to teach people what makes reasoning cogent by means of a critical study of what makes reasoning fallacious (Kahane, 1971).