Logic & Science

“Reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do. More precisely, it is assessing the authenticity, accuracy, and/or worth of knowledge claims and arguments. It requires careful, precise, persistent and objective analysis of any knowledge claim or belief to judge its validity and/or worth.” Source: definition of critical thinking

The practice of critical thinking sets out to assess the validity of premises, logic of arguments, and reliability of conclusions. In practice, discerning the truth of an argument is not always a simple task. Core Concepts in Critical Thinking Introduction to Statements or Claims

An argument is a set of statements. The premises – facts or propositions – are intended to provide support for the conclusion. The conclusion is asserted to be true on the basis of the premises. If an argument is cogent, then a true conclusion follows logically from true premises.

Logic can be symbolic or informal. Symbolic logic examines the precise symbolic representation of logical concepts, the abstract relationships between these concepts, and the systematization of these relationships. Informal logic involves the application of logical principles to assessment the types of informal arguments and claims that we encounter in daily life. Propositional logic is a branch of symbolic logic dealing with propositions as units and with their combinations and the connectives that relate them – if, then compound statements. Propositional Logic Terms and Symbols Proposition evaluator. Categorical logic and categorical syllogisms are more concrete than is propositional logic – some, all, and/not. Venn diagram evaluator.

An understanding of Fallacies of Logic – recognized structural errors in argumentation – provides a shortcut to assessing the cogency of an argument. We most often encounter prepositional arguments in daily life, while the logic of science, and of mathematics in particular, is more often categorical. In special cases such as the behavior of gases, at different temperatures, and under pressure, the “problem of induction” can be disregarded and predictive equations are termed Laws (The Gas Laws).

Scientific predictions, however, represent a subset of experimentation and are propositional – if this hypothesis is correct, then we will observe such and such a phenomenon. Failure to observe the predicted phenomenon might be taken to disprove the hypothesis. However, the failure might be a result of experimental or observational error, or might result from faulty predictions based upon a reasonable hypothesis. Alternatively, the hypothesis may be incorrect, but the predicted phenomenon is observed because of a mechanism not yet hypothetically considered.

For these reasons peer-reviewed scientific papers include analyses of current thinking, descriptions of methods, and statements of results so that other researchers might attempt replication. In science, unlike the case for mathematics, proof is not possible, while disproof – falsification – is possible. For this reason, hypotheses to be experimentally tested are ideally framed in such a way that they may be disproved – falsifiable hypotheses. When an empirically based, logical hypothesis, which has not been disproved after repeated testing, is deemed satisfactory by consensus within the scientific community, then the hypothesis graduates to the status of Theory (capitalized to differentiate the scientific term from its vernacular usage). In practice, much of science proceeds upon positive results – repeated observations of a phenomenon under particular conditions. In the softer sciences, such as the social sciences, statistical analyses of results play an important role. Some sciences, such as paleontology are by their nature outside the possibility of experimentation – we cannot resurrect dinosaurs or recreate meteor impacts – and must proceed on the basis of accumulated empirical evidence.

composing problems

Composition, Fallacy of composition

Fallacy of composition arguments hinge upon an artificial and inappropriate extrapolation from members of group to the whole group, or parts of an object to the whole object.

Attempts to discredit modern theory by citing past theories discredited by modern science fail on the grounds that they are fallacies of composition. The fact that some earlier scientific theories have been discarded does not mean that current theories ought necessarily to be discarded. Equally, the fact that some scientists have made fraudulent claims, or that some evidence has been faked does not mean that all scientists make fraudulent claims or that all evidence has been faked.

The history of science suggests that some current hypotheses and theories will be supplanted by better explanations, just as some earlier hypotheses have been revised. Such revisions are within the nature of science and will be based upon new empirical or experimental evidence* and not upon the unfounded criticisms of creationists unless creationist or idists present new evidence or valid experimental results.

Creationists, idists, and fodis do not yet have a falsifiable hypothesis for idism, have not yet conducted scientific experiments on idism, and have not yet** published any peer-reviewed scientific papers on idism, so it is extremely unlikely that any revisions of scientific hypotheses or theories will ever result from creationists' fallacies of composition.


*Recently discovered exceptions to the central dogma of genetics are an example of this revision – the concepts within the "dogma" have been repeatedly verified, but experimentally discovered exceptions have led to an expansion of understanding to include the newly discovered mechanisms of genetic expression.
** as of June, '06

Contradictions within idism

The New Yorker: PRINTABLES:
"Dembski's views on the history of life contradict Behe's. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell, Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D. routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often major differences of opinion. In the end, it's hard to view intelligent design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.

It's also hard to view it as a real research program. Though people often picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has produced countless important experiments (let's re-create a natural species in the lab - yes, that's been done) and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that's why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly ten years since the publication of Behe's book, by contrast, I.D. has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics."