The Application of Logos

 Logos is Greek term meaning "discourse" or "plea" and it's essentially argumentation.

We use it when we engage in debate. We can employ informal logic to articulate and critically examination positions through logos.

This is probably familiar to most of you.

If you're going to employ it helps to understand common fallacies that come up in debate. Things like burning straw men, appeals to hypocrisy, appeals to nature, appeals to tradition, appeals to emotion, appeals to authority, and even appeals to logical fallacies are often fallacious.

Here's the issue with it. It usually doesn't help, as per what I call John Stuart Mill's lament. He writes in "The Oppression of Women":

 The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of those which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social transition;

 

I only disagree with him on one aspect of this, and that is that it doesn't include thinking errors in his analysis. In fact, I'd say thoughts - more specifically thinking errors - are more profound than feelings in terms of causing us to hold incorrect beliefs. Feelings are where our investment in those thoughts are grounded. They work in tandem, but they are distinct, as I'm sure most any mental health professional familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy will tell you.

Given he wrote this in 1869 we can afford him some leeway in terms of how he conceptualizes the way we think, as he's close enough.

Untangling thinking errors is a personal thing. I've got loads of them due to a messy childhood and mental illness. The only way to untangle them is to want to. It has to start with the person themselves.

Logic isn't going to help instill the desire to change beliefs. Pain and loss due to those beliefs will as long as they can see the connection. Self-interest will. This makes debate almost futile except in the unfortunately rarer cases where all parties are interested in self-examination and self-correction, rather than self-preservation.

Take a page from Plato. Where logos is profoundly helpful - I'd argue most helpful - is when we debate ourselves - and do so honestly. Our ego spends much of its conscious time preserving our id. This includes defending our worldview, however flawed. We can apply critical thinking to our own internal rhetoric, and that is probably the most effective use of logos, because if you're willing to do so, you're receptive to change as a matter of course.

I'll go further and say that whether it's internal or external debate, another aspect of debating effectively is humility. If you already think you know everything you're going to defend it rather than be open to learning something new or being corrected. Humility is a foundational component - perhaps the foundational building block of wisdom, and it's central to allowing us to learn.

The question then becomes, are you capable of being humble and honest with yourself? It's not automatic. It takes work. Sometimes it even takes therapy, rather than a cathartic Internet debate. The work however, is good for you.

If you think you're immune to this, or think you've already mastered it then it will make you more susceptible to thinking errors in your complacency. None of us have mastered it because the kind of eternal and incessant vigilance required to check every one of our beliefs simply isn't human. We don't have the mental throughput to do that. That said, we can check the important ones, and be more open to others checking them on our behalf. Ultimately they're doing you a favor.