Someone whose name shall be withheld to protect the guilty made a comment to me on another site. He claimed that science does not depend on logic, but rather on evidence, evidently oblivious to the fact that determining whether data constitute evidence requires logic.
This is what you get, I guess, when you can get a Ph.D. without ever darkening the door of a class on formal or informal logic. Sigh. Many have degrees, fewer are educated.
Update & clarification: It may or may not be the case with the "guilty party." However, if you can get a Ph.D. without logic, where does that leave the rest of us? It's not a pretty thought.
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And of course, the assumption that evidence helps to establish the thing of which it is evidence is based on logic as well. Without logic, you could endlessly argue (using what you believed to be logic -- gee, you just can't get away from it!) whether looking through a telescope and seeing the evidence that a star is out there means anything in terms of whether there are stars out there. Hey, you can show me all the evidence in the world of something, but if I don't believe that evidence proves anything (and it's a logical proposition that evidence proves things) then you'll get nowhere.
Blame modern education -- and not just the U.S. public school system -- for reducing "logic" to a semi-useless construct used to complicate things, rather than simply the description of organized thinking as opposed to mental chaos.
...he's (over on that other site) a doctor?
...of what?
The guilty party? Not that I know of.
I just know that it's possible to get a Ph.D. without ever darkening the door of a logic class. I nearly did, and I think that the failure to require this has consequences that are pretty obvious in various areas of research--global warming and evolution are two great examples.
This person should be reminded that all "evidence" is subject to specific principles of "reasoning" aka logic.
A cursory review of the scientific method seems in order.
I doubt that PHD is science related.
Oops, I guess I made an inadvertent mistake by placing the Ph.D. comments by the "guilty party" comments. Nope, that was not the connection I meant to convey.
But regarding Ph.D.s and logic, I know quite a few guys who have them and have not had a single logic class, and there is evidence (see posts above & below) that this is having a bad effect, especially in investigation of climate.
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