It seems a hard road to travel, to have to analyse, through a rigorous procedure of logic testing, what you are to say about any subject, by testing its logical premise with a series of questions to verify a specific truth. The truth of a statement, according to logic can be investigated by asking supplementary questions to ensure that the question your asking is valid in terms of the subject. Too often we engage in waffle and obfuscate the truth by deliberately sowing doubt and disguising our apparent search for truth by using carefully contrived verbal gymnastics to move the debate away from the truth we are supposed to be searching for.
One man's truth is another man's inconvenience and yet the purity of a truth obtained by logic and logical reasoning sets the matter out of reach of those perusing untruth.
Logic is the act of 'reasoning' according to strict rules of validity, its the use of deductive structures to define the validity of an argument. Validity then is the corner stone of the logical argument.
if a thing or statement about a thing is contingent (dependent on circumstance) then it is not based on logic, which by its nature is not contingent. The use of informal logic, 'critical thinking' is not as rigorous as formal logic but if, academically one has the time to study the proof of each statement we then establish a totemic relationship as evidenced in Buddhist reasoning.
The strain on us, as individuals to weigh up each and all our statement of what we call fact is enormous. Many of our pet beliefs come tumbling down on the high alter of logic and our world comfort, made up of belief and counter belief is torn apart by the stricture of logical reasoning. Perhaps the uncontaminated mind of a small child harbours the flowering of uncontested truth which is a marvellous asset and subscribes to the co-opting of young boys into Buddhist monasteries to train them to think logically all the time.
Sadly for us poor sinners the thought of discarding so many erroneous beliefs over which we have spent many hours refining and debating is too enormous to even contemplate. Instead we walk on a sea of partial truth, happily engaging in a battle to preserve the undefinable.
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