All right, so this is a discourse on the origins of logic, and this is a philosophical problem

that is quite considerable, which is how do we know, or why would we believe that logic

is valid?

How do we know that logic is important?

How do we know that logic is valid, How do we know that logic is valid and so on, right?

So, logic is consistency, and logic, of course, is the dominoes that fall from a valid syllogism.

Sorry, this is all kind of technical stuff, but a valid syllogism is one where if we assume the premises are true

and the reasoning is true, then conclusion must be true. Classic example is all men are mortal.

Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. And there are two major branches of logic,

inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning is 100% truth. Inductive reasoning is probability.

It is not absolutely for sure that someone who jumps out of a plane without a parachute is going to die, but we wouldn't put a lot of money on him surviving, right? So that's probability. And the example

I give in my book, The Art of the Argument is you have a neighbor, she's a kind of baddy, crazy

old woman, and your neighbor has, you know, she has 23 cats, and you've seen 22 cats in her

backyard, and they're all black cats with white faces.

Now, what are the odds that the 23rd cat is also a black cat with a white face?

Well, you can't say 100%, but she seems to have a pretty strong preference for black cats with white faces.

So you can say, of course, that it's pretty likely. And of course, we do this all the time,

right? We do this all the time. If there is a fin in the water, in the ocean, by the beach, you're

probably not going to go for a big old swim unless you figure out that it's a

dolphin, not a shark, right? So, you mean, you can't know for sure without checking if you

see the fin, or at least it's pretty tough. So we have syllogisms, we have inductive reasoning,

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