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Well yes, so if this problem effects both logic and natural language, why is everyone harping on symbolic logic? Aristotelian logic is just as vulnerable because it uses natural language.

It is a problem for both. See my remarks on Wittgenstein above

“I might point out that the problem is not necessarily a failure to define terms. The problem is exploiting the social value of a word in order to dismiss someone else’s logic.”

–Again, why is this a problem facing symbolic logic but not ordinary language? If my opponent calls me a ‘bigot’ to avoid addressing my argument, my opponent is not even using symbolic logic. He is merely exploiting the social value of a word–as you rightly said.

More importantly, calling me a ‘bigot’ is a fallacious Red-herring, an ad hominem, a form of mising the point. So even if I WERE a bigot and what I said was bigoted, this is not a counterexample to the truth of what I said, nor does it undermine the validity of my argument. My opponent could also call me a ‘sexist’ for pointing out that most women do not have as much upper body strength as most men. But just because he finds my observation personally distasteful, and I am indeed ‘sexist’ by his lights, my alleged ‘sexism’ and his distaste doesn’t make what I said any less true, nor does it undermine the validity of the argument in which this assertion is found.

The first and foremost problem here is that my opponent refuses to engage in intelligent dialogue, not that he is using symbolic logic to somehow steer the argument in his direction. We see this happen all the time in our culture, but I don’t see why symbolic logic is the problem. Isn’t the opposite true? My opponent is being very ILlogical.

“”Because symbolic logic is propositional, it forms a bond between words and syntax, allowing the user to ignore the pesky task of semantics.”

–But since when does symbolic logic allow this strategy as an acceptable form of argumentation? A person cannot just start assigning symbols to what he things is the semantic values of words and hope to get an intelligent rebuttal out of it. You should always define your terms when the words you use are central to your argument!

“But this is impossible, because each term must be defined in terms of others, which leads to a perpetual regress”

–Why is the possibility of an infinite regress a problem only for symbolic logic and not for ordinary language too?

The most obvious difference is that symbolic logic assumes without warrant that existential import for particular (but not universal) propositions. The result of just these two assumptions is that five of the traditional 19 valid categorical syllogism forms are rendered invalid, and the “square of opposition” becomes the “cross of opposition,” since three of the four kinds of opposition are eliminated.

This assumption is embedded in Venn Diagrams commonly used in logic courses.

Another big difference is that, in symbolic logic, all statements are considered truth conditional when they clearly are not. This was one of the reasons why Wittgenstein, who devised the system of truth tables, later repudiated them.

In fact, two of the principals involved in the Principia Mathematica (whence virtually all modern symbolic logic derives) later repudiated the project–Wittgenstein and Alfred North Whitehead. Russell stayed with it, and was not nearly so sanguin as Brafford about the two systems being consistent.

“I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned in this chapter are wholly false,” he says, in his history of Western philosopy, “with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant.”

On the other side, Jacques Maritain says, “Logistics [which is what he calls modern symbolic logic] and logic remain separate disciplines, entirely foreign to one another.”

Brafford says that it must have been possible for nominalists to use Aristotelian logic since nominalism goes back to the 1300s and modern logic does come along until about the turn of the 20th century. That ignores the fact that there was quite a bit of discomfort with a system of logic that philosophers knew was based on Aristotelian metaphysics. The problem was there simply wasn’t any alternative until Frege and Boole began to develop the rudiments of the modern system, a system that was brought to fruition by Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. This was one of the reasons that the then mostly logical positivist (and by implication nominalist) philosophical establishment immediately seized upon it.

To borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins, the modern system made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied positivist.

William Barrett has perhaps the best popular account of how all this went down in his Illusion of Technique.

Veatch challenged the academic establishment on its almost exclusive emphasis on symbolic logic and as far as I can find in the journals, no ever responded to him. I asked Kreeft about this one time and he said that, to his knowledge, no one ever did.

I might point out that the problem is not necessarily a failure to define terms. The problem is exploiting the social value of a word in order to dismiss someone else’s logic. So, in my example, the actual argument has a neutral value and is then associated with words that either have a negative or positive social value. Love = 10, Hate = -10. Joe, I think, summarized this nicely as a ‘fetishization of words’. Because symbolic logic is propositional, it forms a bond between words and syntax, allowing the user to ignore the pesky task of semantics. As, Kreeft’s argument follows, public discourse is then reduced to bullying, and whoever best exploits the propositions is perceived to have the better logic. A good example is the marrying of terms to ‘civil rights’.

In response to LARGO (and concerning linguistic bullying), I am not equivocating the terms ‘value’ and ‘meaning’ or ‘definition’. I am using value in the economic and mathematical sense. The danger is not in misunderstanding the connotation, rather in exploiting the socio-cultural economic value of symbols/words that have a currency beyond their specifically symbolic nature. The battle then becomes whose argument can appeal best to a culturally elevated symbol/word. Basically, this gets around the more interesting task, as you seem to be doing, of actually understanding what we are talking about. A task which is deliciously metaphysical, and I would suggest, much more akin to the ‘Aristotelian’ logic that Kreeft is getting at.

However, I do think Kreeft has a point, and that his point may best be illustrated by an analogy to another “method,” which, like logic (symbolic or otherwise), is often considered “neutral.”

What I have in mind is the “historical-critical method(s)” of interpreting Scripture. The problem in viewing these methods (source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, etc.) as “neutral” is that they arose out of an historical context that was antithetically opposed to the admitting the reality of the supernatural. What this means is that the “historical-critical method(s),” while “neutral” in one sense, methodologically incline its user toward naturalistic (=anti-supernaturalistic) explanations of the Biblical data.

By analogy, while there is no reason for supposing that symbolic logic cannot be employed by epistemological and metaphysical realists (and it is), there is an inherent tendency of the medium and method to focus on formal relations to the exclusion of content. These tendencies were given their initial nominalistic impetus by historical figures like Peter Abelard and William of Ockham, but can be seen in Russell and Frega, Goedel, Kripke and other moderns as well.

Like modern science, whch under the influence of Francs Bacon’s exclusion of formal and final causality and Positivism’s legacy of empiriometric methematization of the physical world, symbolic logic inclines its users to focus on formal relations of propositions and syllogisms without much interest or attention to the material content of essential natures by reference to which those terms may be defined. There is nothing wrong with this as far as it goes. But as with mathematical physics, its user can sometimes forget that he is dealing with formulae two or three steps removed from the pre-theoretical world he inhabits, and sometimes he may even cease to care about that fact.

And that, as Adam Murray so nicely suggests, can be a problem.