What is this supposed to mean? Was there an implied syllogism that I didn’t spot?
It means that if certain assumptions are made, including about what basic words mean (I make no comment on whether these assumptions are correct) then reaching the conclusions that someone is to be blamed relies on making a logic error. So yes, you did miss an implied syllogism—perhaps because you don’t accept the implied premises so don’t consider the syllogism important.
Why did logic even enter the conversation?
Asking this question is a dubious move. Commenting on whether things make any sense at all is reasonably relevant to most conversations and this conversation seems to be about evaluating whether a line of reasoning (in a quote) is to be accepted. That line of reasoning being illogical would be pretty darn relevant if happened to be true (and again, I’m not commenting on the validity of the required premises).
Yeah, I was just confused. I see “illogical” being used in situations that don’t seem to be about logic, and looking at a dictionary to see if I was assuming a wrong meaning didn’t seem to help.
So based on your explanation, it seems like if Alice says “illogical” to Betty like that, I should 1) assume Alice thinks Betty is making a logical argument, 2) figure out what logical argument Alice thinks Betty is supposed to be making, and 3) figure out what Alice thinks is wrong with that argument.
Of course, that sounds like a lot of work, so I’ll probably just start skipping over that word.
It means that if certain assumptions are made, including about what basic words mean (I make no comment on whether these assumptions are correct) then reaching the conclusions that someone is to be blamed relies on making a logic error. So yes, you did miss an implied syllogism—perhaps because you don’t accept the implied premises so don’t consider the syllogism important.
Asking this question is a dubious move. Commenting on whether things make any sense at all is reasonably relevant to most conversations and this conversation seems to be about evaluating whether a line of reasoning (in a quote) is to be accepted. That line of reasoning being illogical would be pretty darn relevant if happened to be true (and again, I’m not commenting on the validity of the required premises).
Yeah, I was just confused. I see “illogical” being used in situations that don’t seem to be about logic, and looking at a dictionary to see if I was assuming a wrong meaning didn’t seem to help.
So based on your explanation, it seems like if Alice says “illogical” to Betty like that, I should 1) assume Alice thinks Betty is making a logical argument, 2) figure out what logical argument Alice thinks Betty is supposed to be making, and 3) figure out what Alice thinks is wrong with that argument.
Of course, that sounds like a lot of work, so I’ll probably just start skipping over that word.
That seems practical. Usually a similar thing can be done with ‘immoral’ too, and ‘right’, and ‘should’.