Posted by
Republiservative on Thursday, May 06, 2010 10:31:46 PM
There are about six dominant types of logic, leading to two main forms of ethics:
Traditional logic: syllogistic reduction of propositions to the first (e.g., if A is B, C is D, A is a D);
Combinatory Logic: analyzes processes associated with autonomous variables;
Deontic Logic: systemizes principles such that nothing can be both obligatory and forbidden, operating in moral neutrality;
Modal Logic: studies features of necessity, possibility, impossibility, and related subjects; and,
Many-Valued Logic: future-contingency interpretation of indeterminates (chaos math, e.g.).
But many modern social scientists and engineers practice only a form of logic coined in the 1950’s by a Soviet expatriate and emulated by Chinese and Japanese concerns in the 1960’s and 1970’s…this would be the doctrine of “fuzzy logic”, something definite and not just a mocking slang term for any thinking one doesn’t like.
“Fuzzy logic” is actually an addition to the Boolean “0 or 1” schema, sort of a “1/2”, and fuzzy logic is what makes every interactive or “intuitive” computer-relevant modern gadget do its thing. As Lamarkian evolutionary theory best fit machines and not life forms, so it seems fuzzy logic best fits with non-human technology.
Fuzzy logic is a system of sets and second-order sets which gives the probability that something is more likely one thing and conjunctively not any other thing; however, it claims it is a mirror of the human mind as it leaves open any expedient mashing of competing terms into a new definition of a mental collectivization just like some people make up expedient if erroneous opinions.
But fuzzy logic disobeys what in logic is known as the “conjunction fallacy” where erroneous definitions are allowed to normalize a false prototypical set; e.g., an apple can’t be both and apple and not-apple unless one elects to say being a wood carving of an apple makes it both apple and not…that is, unless one chooses to re-write a definition of what vegetation classes belong together as equals. This of course requires setting up subjective scales apart from autonomous being/not-being, and violates the Laws of Contradiction and the Excluded Middle (see, e.g., psychologists David Osherson of MIT and Edward Smith of Stanford in their joint work “On the Adequacy of Prototype Theory as a Theory of Concepts”, ‘Cognition’, 9, 1981, pp. 25-58).
All that said, there are two prominent current types of ethics: subjective ethics and objective ethics. Rooted in fuzzy logic, subjective ethics says whereas human rights apply globally, a sovereign of any tribal or greater group on earth may substitute getting or being used to what otherwise are oppressive-seeming tactics for cultural tradition and by virtue of no manifest complaint of their people be respected for their edicts; objective logic usually rooted in combinatory logic and anything BUT fuzzy logic asks if the appearance of impropriety is correct, and if so do most people affected truly desire it contrary to human dignity…if not, then what would be sane policy to try and not abet human rights violators.
Obviously, no particular culture is necessary to be moral or immoral within it.