Aristotle considered it his greatest achievement. Indeed, he discovered and wrote down the rules of logic — the principles that good reasoning seems to follow, and bad reasoning appears to violate. Now everyone can study these rules and learn to think — to reason — properly… And if only they could! How many costly mistakes, misunderstandings, and nasty conflicts we would avoid if we all became rational?
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” ~Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790
In the 20th century, the idea of logic as the foundation of reason gave birth to an entire branch of analytical philosophy. This was a major development — the so-called linguistic turn — “where philosophy increasingly focused on the role of language in shaping thought, knowledge, and reality”, as Google’s AI puts it. The goal remains the same: to promote understanding “by clarifying concepts, identifying logical structures, and avoiding ambiguity in arguments.”
And it sounds great but… is it working?
Maybe ask yourself this question: how many people you know have learned to reason by reading Aristotle? If anything, the opposite is true — you need to know how to reason pretty damn well just to grasp what Aristotle actually wrote. And analytical philosophy? That’s reserved for second- or third-year students in a philosophy undergraduate program.
Nor do you need to look far to realize that we are no more rational today than before Aristotle’s gift to the world. Just turn on the news.
So… what gives? The way I see it, the whole effort rests on an illusion. It only looks like we reason by following the rules of logic. In truth, we are doing something else entirely. Specifically, we describe our model of reality, something we visualize as a kind of machine. And if that machine is of sound design and we see clearly how it works, then our description will carry all the hallmarks of logic in it. This creates the appearance of us following the rules of logic — even though, again, that’s not what we are actually doing.
Truth is, the real understanding and knowledge are visual, not verbal. And that’s why two thousands of years of focusing on language and logic led philosophers precisely nowhere.1
And, yes, that’s why philosophy majors often switch.
A similar debacle happened in economics not long ago with the theory of rational expectations. It practically took over the field — but after all the Nobel prizes and published papers, when the subprime crisis hit in 2008, the models simply could not explain how such a collapse was even possible, let alone offer a solution. And the reason was simple — all that beautiful math was based on a false assumption (in this case, treating humans as calculators).
I really appreciate the interesting and thoughtful perspective of this post and the way it challenges assumptions about logic. That said, I wonder about the visual framework referenced. Isn’t that something that varies a lot among people, with some being strongly visual and others not? Maybe you are highly visual so this makes sense to you? I also question the reliance on news examples: isn’t it a logical flaw to use anecdotal and often biased reporting (delivered through fully biased engagement platforms) as though it fairly represents the world around us?