WHY LOGIC IS IMPORTANT

Logic is the foundation upon which our lives depend.  Each of us, moments after birth, begin our journey exploring the world around us in search of what’s real, or safe, or fun, or comfortable – a quest to sort out sense from nonsense.  These skills expand as we grow, for understanding what’s real and learning how to extrapolate from what little we know as babies, are the fundamental tools of survival. We learn that reaching for an object and retrieving it gets us something we want.

 From this one concept we begin to develop our own logical model of the world around us. When we can reach a cup, we experiment with that cup. At first we can only feel it, then we may learn to move it and then one wondrous day we learn how to push it off the tray on to the floor and gleefully watch all the excitement that accompanies flying cup of liquid. As adults, we generally fail to share the wonderment, while cleaning up the experiment, but this is where the magic begins.

No one has explained logic to us, but by trial and error, and fascinating experimentation we began to know how the real world works. Logic takes care of itself; we only need to look and see how it does it. Once we’ve mastered the art of spilling our milk, we inherently understand that the same thing is possible with orange juice, crackers, and baby food. Although we are far too young to understand the concept of logic as a means of assessing what works and what doesn’t, we are fast becoming masters of basic cause and effect and inductive reasoning.