Question Is a computer conceivable that would cut down on Philosophers' work by immediately identifying logic mistakes in arguments? For example: you enter "The Ontological argument for God" or "David Hume's argument against Inductive Reasoning" (or, for that matter, scan in the entire text of Plato's Republic) into the machine, and it immediately uses its programming (which tells it to watch out for contradiction, and all those other logic laws, etc.) and spits out the mistakes in reasoning. Is the problem with this that it would be too difficult to program, or that the laws of logic are under respectable attack?

Accepted:
April 6, 2008

Comments

Philosophy would be much easier if we could program such a machine -- and boring too. But it's not going to happen. For one thing, there's your interesting point that philosophical disputes can go very deep, so deep as to include disagreement about what the laws of logic, of correct inference, ought to be. Secondly, even for first-order classical logic, there simply is no computer that can decide whether any given inference is correct. (This is known as Church's Theorem and was proved by Alonzo Church in 1936.) Finally, there's the fact that evaluating the logical cogency of arguments is only a (small) part of the business of figuring out what to think about someone's argument in philosophy: at the very least, one must also understand and evaluate the assumptions to which the logical reasoning is applied.