Feature
Clashing Symbols
The Loss of Aristotelian Logic & the Social, Moral & Sexual Consequences
by Peter Kreeft
When I started teaching logic, in 1962, most of the textbooks taught traditional Aristotelian logic rather than the (then still fairly new) "symbolic logic," also called "mathematical logic" or "propositional calculus." Forty years later, there are only two full-length texts of traditional Aristotelian logic in print. One of them is my own recently published logic textbook, Socratic Logic (St. Augustine's Press), from which much of the middle part of this article is taken. All the other logic texts, over 500 of them, teach symbolic logic, or else informal logic (rhetoric).
By the 1970s, most of the English-speaking philosophical establishment had cast in its lot with "analytic philosophy" and the symbolic logic that was its methodological complement. I still vividly remember the reaction of outrage, fear, and loathing that came from that establishment when Henry Veatch published his attack on the new logic (The Two Logics). The book was a bit verbose, bombastic, and intemperate, but it possessed the three most important (and most rare) qualities any book of philosophy should have: it was interesting, it was rational, and it was right. That's why the establishment "went postal." People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right.
But this change in logic is not just a technical, in-house issue for philosophers. It concerns everyone, and it has serious social, moral, and even sexual implications, and it is one of the unrecognized indirect causes of "the culture of death," as I shall try to show in this article.
A Prophetic Phone Call
I realized this only reluctantly. What first buzzed my inner alarm was a phone call I received about 25 years ago from a man who was quite famous (but not with me: I have forgotten his name). He had written a book attacking the computer revolution. The book had been on the New York Times best-seller list for a number of weeks and had elicited high praise. The author had been called "one of the ten most intelligent men in the world." He thought he had found in me an ally for his cyber-Luddite philosophy because he had read some personal complaint against computers in one of my books. (Yes, I do hate the arrogant little bastards. They are robbers, tricksters, and snobs. "I hate them with perfect hatred, I count them mine enemies.")
The caller tried to persuade me of this apocalyptic scenario: The use of computers, he claimed, was imperceptibly changing the very structure of human thought into a geometrically increasing left-brain dominance and right-brain atrophy; so that, as we became more and more willing servants of more and more elaborate calculating machines, our acts of ordinary intuitive understanding were becoming rarer and harder. He seemed to me an extremist and a conspiracy theorist, and I mentally labeled him a crank and a crackpot. But he offered me three pieces of empirically verifiable evidence for his hypothesis, each of them testable by anyone who had taught logic for the last thirty years.
The first was the general prediction that students would become increasingly incapacitated in Aristotelian logic as they became increasingly capable in symbolic logic. The second was more specific: that they would be increasingly unable to understand analogies, and analogical terms. (For understanding analogies is one thing digital computers cannot do. It is an intuitive, "right-brain" act.) The third prediction was the most specific of all, and, I thought, the most absurd: the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), taken by nearly every applicant to college in America, would soon abolish its entire section on analogies because upcoming students would no longer be able to understand them. (These tests had never been substantively changed in fifty years, though they had been repeatedly "dumbed down.")
A few years, later, the third prediction literally came true. Remembering the other predictions, I got out some of my oldest, easiest logic tests, from 1962, and gave them to my current logic students. They failed quite spectacularly, especially the questions about analogical terms. For instance, only three students in a class of 75 understood that in the sentence "He pointed with his right hand to the hands of the clock," the word "hands" is analogical. Very few had had any trouble with that in 1962.
But, you may say, this is only a change in abstract logical thinking; where are the social, moral, and sexual consequences that my title claims?
To explain this, I need to give you a very short course in the history of logic and modern philosophy.
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