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Article 1191 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: silber@orfeo.Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Silber)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: The essence of "arguments"/paraphrasing Camus (was: Is there any such thing as informal logic?)
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Date: 4 Nov 91 18:29:05 GMT
References: <1991Oct22.041210.5931@watserv1.waterloo.edu> <JMC.91Nov3151101@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <1991Nov4.001344.5044@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1991Nov4.001344.5044@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <JMC.91Nov3151101@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> 
>jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
>
>>In-Reply-To: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu's message of 3 Nov 91 08:15:14 GMT
>
>JMC:
>>1. You may define logic as having to do only with valid arguments.
                                                          ^^^^^^^^^^
>>However, logicians are more and more concerning themselves with
>>non-monotonic reasoning, and the logic journals accept papers
                ^^^^^^^^^
>>having to do with non-monotonic reasoning.  20 years from now
>>you won't be able to get a PhD in logic without knowing something
>>about non-monotonic reasoning.
>
>I *do* define logic as having to do with valid arguments; this definition
>is justified by philosophical and historical considerations, and motivated
>on a personal level by several years of study from Alonzo Church; perhaps,
>as someone who was among the first computer scientists to appreciate
>Church's work, you would be able to sympathize with the latter reason, even
>if you remain unmoved by the former.  However, I would hardly want to
>regulate the activities of logicians......
...
>My reasons for excluding non-monotonic reasoning from the purview of logic
>are philosophical, and, at least to me, quite compelling.  Perhaps I can
>make myself understood by appealing to your political sentiments: to
>paraphrase Albert Camus, I am conservative about the things I find worthy
>of preservation, and *logos* is one of the few such things I can identify.

 In ,,La Chute'', the speaker/rhetorician/narrator says:
 ,,Quand on n'a pas de caractere, il faut bien se donner une METHODE .''

 This is of course referring to politics, not logic, however, in my naive
 reading of the messages on this thread, i am attracted to the word,
 "argument"; quite naively, I suppose that the essence of "argument"
 is bound up with the idea of a "sequence" (a logical sequence).  In
 alternative "logics", in trying to "get at" "common sense", it seems 
 that one of the objectives is to escape the sequential character of
 "logos" AS  verbal argumentation.  Isn't part of the point about
 "common sense" that there is something more to reasoning than "logic" ?

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