Topics Logic

Question When someone says "That seems(or does not seem) logical" it is not always easy to know how they define "logical". Is it meaningful at all? I guess the question relates to the use of something that seems to be a looser term than e.g. "deductively valid" or the like, which refers to a particular system of inference and specific rules for determining truth or falsehood of propositions. Do you have any idea as to what the term commonly refers to?

Accepted:
May 24, 2012

Comments

I don't really, but it is one of my biggest pet peeves, from the perspective of one grading students' philosophy papers! ... My guess would be that on many such occasions, the person means something like "valid" -- where "valid" does NOT mean the technical deductive notion but something closer to "true"! (They will often say, "P is not logical," clearly meaning that P is false ...) Occasionally people use it with a defeater: "P seems logical, and yet here's why it's false ..." On such uses they seem to mean "apparently true, even if not really true." Rarely do they use it with anything very close to its basic sense, if not quite "deductively valid" then at least bearing some relationship to arguments and conclusions (where to say "P is logical" would be to say "P is based on some form of argument") ....