What is wrong with this quote?

Question

"It is the province of logic to tell why a reasoning is false. It is the business of sociology to explain its wide acceptance."
Is it a bad argument ?or a fallacy, if its a fallacy which kind can you be specific and why?

My professor doesn't like this quote and I want to know why?

Answer 1

It is very true. We think and speak and write in syllogism, propositions. In syllogistic logic, there are 72 forms of propositions. Of the 72, 60 lead to false conclusions. Only 12 lead to propositions that may be true but are not necessarily true. No propsition has to be true if no one has proposed the truth in a proposition. So logic must prove reason. As for sociology, yeah, that explains what we believe to be true and sometimes even get the "why" part correct. But for you part, be vigilant and use your logic to prove or disprove reason, other's reasoning as well as your own. You must be the judge of what you believe to be true or untrue.

Answer 2

I am not exactly sure why your teacher doesn't like this statement, but i do see a flaw in it.

In Men in black, they said, a person is smart, people are stupid.

People believed that the earth was flat, until a person deduced otherwise.

I don't like this quote because its true. Through ignorance and/or a lack of understanding, society will take a lie for truth until someone logically proves that truth wrong.

Examples:

There is a Flintstones commercial that says smoking a cigarette is good for your health. We now know that this isn't true, but at the time, they society didn't know.

It was once thought that electrons, protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom. Through a better understanding of atoms, we now know that this is not true. There are components of an atom that are smaller than these.

Thus, if no one can prove a truth wrong, then it will remain a truth even if it is wrong.

I hope i helped you in some way.

Answer 3

I don't see anything at all wrong with the statement. Logic will certainly tell us if the reasoning behind a thing is valid. But if there is a wide-spread belief in that thing, then it implies a widespread (or sociological) reason (or need) to believe that the thing is true.

I have no idea at all why your prof. doesn't like the quote. Why don't you ask them? And if they can't give you a rational, coherent answer it means that everything else that they say should be taken with a larger than average grain of salt.

Doug

Answer 4

Pure logic doesn't care if it is 'true' or 'false' the dry sense of it is cold and to the point. The preference isn't there, only the data.
Sociology, is time based study of the current time, unfortunately there is little to base it other than reflection and history. So one is a science and one is a study of a possible science.