Where Logic Fails

Okay, so the point came up “Where exactly does Logic fall short of providing good answers?”

Fair enough. I made a statement I’m asked to support it. I will do so with a simple example.

Six family members are headed out of town for a weekend of fun on the beach when someone announces “The coffee pot is still on. It never got shut off.”

Now in some families this would be no big deal. The driver might simply turn around and head back home. Or someone, hopefully not the driver, would take out their cell phone and call a trusted friend or family to go in and turn the offending coffee pot off. Or they might decide to hell with it, let the old place burn to the ground, we have insurance.

For some families the exact opposite happens. I knew one where this situation would launch them all into a full fledged screaming match for an hour or more determining which one was the incompetent idiot who was to blame.

If it were decided the person who made the coffee in the first place should have turned it off then everyone would make a point in the future of trying to get someone else to make the coffee. If it were decided that the last one out the door were the one to blame then everyone would make a point in the future to make sure someone else would be the first one out the door — Never themself.

A logical persons approach to this situation would be to first discard all non-logical arguments. Then they would canvass for, or even suggest solutions. But the minute they started canvassing for solutions, or even suggesting solutions, they would no longer be operating on a strictly logical basis. They have now entered into the creative process.

A Map Thinker™ would go straight to the heart of the situation.

This is where we are.

Then they would ask “How did we get here?”

We got here because everyone got sidetracked and ran out the door without thinking about the coffee pot. While one or more people may have been better positioned to remember the coffee pot than some of the others the fact is they all forgot to turn off the pot.

To refuse to shoulder their own part in the problem, and to attempt to blame one single person for the situation is both illogical and Mapologically unsound. This refusal to accept any portion of the blame is something certain people do all the time — And it does not matter what type of reasoning you use the chances are it is a waste of your time and theirs trying to show them where they went wrong.

The next question is the future.

How likely is it this could happen again in the future?

Probably good.

How do you keep people from getting excited and sidetracked during while heading out the door for a weekend vacation? When all they want to think about is what they are going to do on the beach.

One way to prevent it happening again would be to assign one person to coffee-pot-final-check-before-going-out-the-door duty.

But that person could be sick,

or doing something else,

or simply forget again.

So the best way to solve the potential future problem is to develop a final checklist everyone goes over before heading out the door on vacation.

So a Map Thinker™ would not even concern themself with whether or not any given argument was valid or not valid or logical or illogical.

They would go straight to the creative process by looking at the past that got them into the mess.  Looking at the potential future and estimating each possible result. Then attempting to come up with a way to alter the outcome.

While it is quite possible for a person using Logic to arrive at the same solution I prefer the Map Solution Method™.

It is interesting to me that when deciding where to go for dinner or vacation logical people will suggest that you write all the pros in one column of a piece of paper and all the cons on the other so you can weigh their respective merits.

In other words a person who claims to solve problems using Logic has just told you to draw up a map and evaluate it.

Which is exactly what any Map Thinker™ would do.

Yet one more thing Logic cannot find a solution for is excellently presented by metonymy4u in “The Critique of Free Reason”. I’m sure there is a better way to link to their site than what I just did but I’m new to this.

Hopefully this link will work: http://metonymy4u.com/2013/03/24/the-critique-of-free-reason/

Can Map Thinking™ present a solution?

Yes. Map Thinking™ insists that the thinker use the simple technique of estimating the results of any solution and then choosing that which produces the desired result.

What result do you choose?

© 2013 All rights reserved.