What Remains To Be Seen

It is surprising that at this late date in the advance of civilizations that reason should come under such persistent attack from both Religion and Government. It makes one wonder, what constitutes an "advance"?

We have seen what corporations and governments do with computers. We have yet to see what philosophers may do with them. But the fact that they have done so little of popular note with this marvelous tool remains.

Here's a suggestion:

Automated parsing of spoken and written language for modal logic patterns laid out by Aristotle. We are innundated daily by propagandistic manglings of language by sophists with nefarious self-interests in play. But the philosophers have so far not availed us of this necessary tool. My GMail account knows how to parse a conversation well enough to target my conversational topics as advertising keywords. Are you telling me that all those Ph.D.s at Google are not philosophers? Pfeh.

I suspect that the reason lawyers do not appeal to a universally available and long known, even ancient, system of logical argumentation and analysis, is that they all want the leeway to lie and obsfuscate and mislead with fallacy when it next suits them; though they all know logic, they all have tacitly agreed not to use it in an obviously systematic way. This means we must rely on their gamesmanship as much or more than upon their construal of -- our -- arguments. Rather than the sparse rules of logic, we have a truly labyrinthine system of laws that requires their very expensive expertise to negotiate. Funny how that works.

Another obstacle is that modal logic has been one-upped among the academics by propositional logic ("Type Theory"). But it should not have been -- the two systems should not be competing at all, because they deal with different problems. Modal logic deals with human language and thought; Type Theory deals with abstractions useful to mathematicians and scientists. Keep them both, of course -- and use them both where they are needed.

It is the role of the philosopher to step into the void created by corporate-lackey Doctors of Philosophy and the academic camp-followers of the engineering schools. The academics and Ph.D's exclude themselves from being iconoclasts, going along to get along; but when the institutions have all been corrupted by greed or politics or both, iconoclasism is the last refuge of the lover of the vision of the truth; who is, if it needs be said, the only Philosopher worthy of the title. Give me Logic, or give me Bush. Oh, you already did. Gee thanks.