How reliable is logic?

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It’s reliable only so long as you color within the lines of rationality. But if you start to venture outside of that domain, logic gets less and less useful.

I’ve been trying to get a handle on the concept of rationality lately, it’s precise definition eludes me for the moment. Meaning forms a web, a fabric if you will, what’s true constitutes a straight line through the web.

Rationality concerns knowledge, which is a subset of the full domain of meaning. Knowledge, and thus rationality, was invented by the ancient Greek philosophers. The idea was to take what was true, and what could be believed, and put them together with a justification, to create the justified true belief, the building block of knowledge.

Logic is a form of justification. These days, we consider to logic to be the domain of the valid inference. Validity means your reasoning shows that it’s impossible for your premises to be true and the conclusion to be false.

There are many many forms of logic, each form of logic forms the basis for a body of knowledge.

It is at this point I would have liked to start giving examples of things that are not logical but still nevertheless justified true beliefs, i.e. knowledge. But I can’t. The reason why is because any way I can relate those things to knowledge either forms a basis of justification that can be worked on, or provokes immediate rejection of meaningfulness. For example trying to invoke God to a materialist will only earn you demands to show the proof. I can talk around the varied frames of rationality that religion can occupy all day long, but I can never prove God, no one can.

Instead, we need to completely leave the realm of knowledge so that I can make my point. There are things in the world that are meaningful, but not quite logical. What this means is that there is rationality “somewhere,” but the rationality is not really germane to the experience. This is the realm of beauty. Trying to describe why something is beautiful or humorous or any of the myriad descriptive words we apply to creative works is always going to be a rather subjective process.

For example, I can use the rules of humor to tell a completely humorless joke. Well, it won’t be totally humorless, but it can fall totally flat, there’s little rhyme or reason behind what people find funny. In order to craft something beautiful, you need to take into critical awareness the minds of the people you are creating that thing for.

This falls into the domain of fashion. What’s in vogue this season will fall flat the next. But not everyone lives at the razor edge of fashion so you can take last year’s fashions and sell them to different people who couldn’t have afforded the latest fashions anyway.

There aren’t good justifications for why things become fashionable, so fashion is pretty far outside the realm of logic, which is a specific type of justification. Eventually what was fashionable will find justification and so enter into the realm of the stylish. Style can be studied and learned. Fashion is subject to the whims of the masses.

Rationality pushes towards an ever enlarging ‘core’ of ideas that can be justified by building bridges into the irrational realm of things that we really don’t understand all that well.