Valid Reasoning

“To discover truth is the task of all Sciences; it falls to logic to discern the laws of truth. I assign to logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not of assertion or thought."
Gottlob Frege "The Thought : A Logical Inquiry" in Mind Vol. 65.

Reason is the human tool for survival and Logic is the study of principles of correct reasoning. The brain is wired to find patterns in disconnected pieces information but doing so without valid methods leads to results that may lead to false conclusions. Logic does not assert thought; it states the principles of a valid thought process.

Prominent psychologists (Kolberg among them) have suggested that only ten percent of the population ever reason at the highest or adult level. Valid reasoning is a learned process and we can improve reasoning abilities by studying the principles of correct reasoning.

There are many voices competing for credibility in our belief system. These voices include the media, the clergy, the government and even our own desires to simply believe what we feel like believing. We are free to evade the effort of thinking-to reject reason-but we are not free to escape the penalty of rejecting reason.

Logic is not a trick of language used to outsmart an opponent during an argument. It is not a detatched mathematical code incompatible with human emotions. It is also not something that could be set aside with a whim with no negative repercussions. In short logic is neither false nor useless. The purpose of logic is to learn the valid principles of reasoning. The purpose of learning the valid principles of reasoning is to arrive at the truth.