AF Hall of Fallacies

[Rayaan]

Actually, if you throw in the claim that pretty = smart as a premise (Pretty women are very intelligent, and that girl is very pretty, therefore she must be smart!), he's been quite logical. Logic is to say that, should premises hold true: result is so. If a premise does not hold true, the system registers that the conclusion is not necessarily so. The former system is one that is 'sound', the latter is one that is 'unsound'... but both of these are valid. However, if you swapped only the word 'illogical' with the word 'logical': you would be correct: Nothing could be logical unless a claim of truth is made

Oftentimes, a person will base their conclusions off of premises that they believe to be true. Infact, it's a rare person indeed who would base their conclusions off of anything else.

I get what you're saying, and it made more sense to me after thinking about it for a while. I also agree with you that even purely subjective issues can be logical sometimes; the thing is that my use of the word "logic" in this thread was limited to the formal and symbolic types logic only, not in the wider sense of the word - so I guess it was just a disagreement over semantics.

I recently came across a passage in an article about the scope of logic as viewed by Stoic philosophers and it reminded me of what you said, which is the following:

For the Stoics, the scope of what they called ‘logic’ (logikê, i.e. knowledge of the functions of logos or reason) is very wide, including not only the analysis of argument forms, but also rhetoric, grammar, the theories of concepts, propositions, perception, and thought, and what we would call epistemology and philosophy of language.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/#Log