Attitudes, points of view and practical

procedures whose adoption preapares the mind

for a successful engagement with logic.

1. Be attentive

2. Get the facts straight

3. Ideas and the objects of ideas

4. Be mindful of the origins of

ideas

5. Match ideas to facts

6. Match words to ideas

7. Effective communication

8. Avoid vague and ambiguous

language

9. Truth

- Pay attention.

- Don’t just hear, listen.

- Don’t just look, see.

- The little things are not to be

ignored.

- Train yourself to focus on details.

- Attention demands an active,

energetic response to every situation,

to the persons, places, and things that

make up the situation.

- A facts is something made or done.

- There are 2 basic types of objectives facts,

things and events.

- Facts can also be thought of as objective

or subjective. But things and events are

objective facts, they exist in the public

domain; a subjective fact is one that is

limited to the subject experiencing it.

- An idea is the subjective evocation of an

objective fact.

- The control we have over our ideas is not

absolute, it is real.

- Our ideas are the means, not the ends, of

our knowledge, they link us to the world,

if they are clear ideas the links are strong

- The idea in the mind, as we have seen, is a

subjective fact, but the kind of the fact we

are concerned with establishing is objective

fact.

- The basic components to human

knowledge are:

1. An objective fact

2. The idea of the fact

3. The word that we apply to the idea

- Bad ideas can be informative, not about

the objective world; but about the subject

state of the persons who nourish those

ideas

- Ideas as such are not communicable from

one mind to another.

- Putting the right word to an idea is not an

automatic process, and sometimes it can be

quite challenging.

- Language and logic are inextricable bound

up with each other.

- It is impossibe to have clear

communication without clear thinking.

- Matching words to ideas is the first and

most basic step in communication. The nex

step is putting ideas toguether to form

coherent statements.

- Usually the context in wich a general

term appears will allow your audience to

figure out its referent, but if you have any

doubts about that use a specific term.

- The only way to avoid ambiguity is to

spell things out as explicity as possible.

- The whole purpose of

reasoning of logic is to arrive

at the truth of things.

- Truth has 2 basic forms:

- Ontological truth

- Logical truth

Assimilate the principles to the point

where they become.

1. First principles

2. Real gray areas, manufactured

gray areas

3. Explanation for everything,

eventually

4. Don't stop short in the search

for causes

5. Distinguish among causes

6. Define your terms

7. The categorical statement

8. Generalizing

- Logic as a science, has its first principles,

but logic stands in a unique relationship to

all other science because the first principle

of logic apply not just to logic but to all

the science.

Other first principles are:

• The principle of identity

• The principles of the excluded

middle

• The principle of sufficient

reason

• The principle of contradiction

- A gray area is a situation in

wich the truth cannot be

clearly established.

- Gray area exists as gray

only because there are the

distinct alternatives of

black and white.

A good part of our energies as

rational creatures is devoted to the

search causes. We want to know why

things happen.

???!!!

Sometimes our

failure to find the

root causes of

things is for simple

lazyness. We don´t

investigate enough

The efficient causes is an agent whose

activity bring something into existence or

that modifies its existence in one way or

another.

The process of definition, the mechanics of

it, is the way we relate a particular object

to other and thereby give it a precise

location.

The logical definition of terms is a 2 step:

1. Place the term to be defined in its,

“proximate genus”

2. Identify the terms specific difference

- The purpose of the reasoning

process, logic’s principal

concern, is demostration.

- An argument will only be as

good as the statement of wich it

is composed, and those

statement , in turn will only be

as good as the terms of wich

they are composed.

- The most effective argument is

one whose conclusion is a

categorical statement.

- A general statement is one whose subject is

very large in scope. Such a statement is not

neccesarily inaccurate.

- Explicit language in general statements is

important because it guards against any

possible confusion on the part of an

audience.