What happens after death?

[Adrianis]

That is a logical conclusion. It doesn't matter whether any of the premises are true, or based on fact or material evidence, it is logical by nature of the process. I don't believe it is true, but I do believe that it is a logical conclusion. That is Formal logic, not Boolean logic - Boolean Logic defines true/false statements and is more directly related to mathematics

But what do we gain by examining whether it is logical based on the premises? I know where that can be useful - when you know the premises and the conclusion, such as in programming. It is not useful when trying to prove that something is rational.

BTW, don't the two overlap somewhat? I'm not an expert, but the if p and r and z then q examples which you have been giving are Boolean statements right? If this is true, and this is false, and this is true, then this is true.

And I apologize for my poor example, which was made in some haste. I could reword it so it is more solid logically, but the point is abundantly clear.

Before anything else I realise I made a really stupid mistake in using the IF...THEN keywords, because they are very much part of Boolean logic, so you are absolutely right to point that out. If you take away those words the structure still remains, I'm sorry for that but I hope you understood the point of it. As it stands, it's an extraordinarily poor example of Boolean logic because it doesn't offer any alternative conclusions. Without those words it's a decent (i hope) example of formal logic, though the previous examples were far more concise, just irrelevant to the thread.

But what do we gain by examining whether it is logical based on the premises? ... It is not useful when trying to prove that something is rational

We gain the knowledge that it is logical, as opposed to illogical. However, something being logical or illogical doesn't really say anything in and of itself, so for the purpose of this discussion, we gain absolutely nothing. We can only find out if a conclusion is factual by examining the premises used, but if we find that the premises are factual then the conclusion must be factual, by the nature of the structure, because it requires that the premises automatically lead to one definite conclusion.

If the conclusion is not drawn directly from a combination of the premises, then the conclusion is illogical. This then means that we can only say something is illogical if all the premises are available to us. But critically, it does not matter if the premises are based on fact, that only matters if you want to know if the conclusion is factual. Rational thought, as far as I understand it, relies on evidence and fact to make deductions.


(Your example was fine, and the point was clear. Mine was also very much rushed, I can only hope that mine was equally clear)