Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: "Nothing"

the excluded middle
Greg — (archived)

These arguments seem to come down to using logic wrongly. Logic is based on the excluded middle, that there is a yes/no, wright/wrong, black/white, and nothing in between. This is not a proven fact though, but an axiom. In other words this is a rule made up in logic that allows it to function, like digitising an argument by removing all those analogue facts.
The world is not like this though, it functions in shades of greys. Whenever someone approaches the world in the right/wrong excluded middle logic they run up against shades of grey sitauations. Like Bush doesn't use nuance he doesn't understand these greys, and so can't control or solve them.
For example the right/wrong of good people/terrorists ends up in the greys of bombing innocent people and turning them into terrorists. Also the greys of whether the Iraqis are freedom fighters or terrorists now. Of course this was the same in Vietnam where no one knew who was a terrorist or not.
In the opposite situation too much emphasis on the greys can make a black/white outcome more possible. Some might argue that in the intelligence anlysis it was all about trying to determine the shade of grey, i.e. danger, while it might have been a black/white situation of extreme danger. As it turns out though it wasn't.
So this foreign policy which refuses to look at the greys of the world usually ends up confronting them in a worse situation. The axis of evil is another example of the black/white good/evil dichotomy with no shades of grey. The result of that policy seems to have been to wreck the whole North Korean situation.
In other words the administration is being run by people who are irrational, they can't understand the simple rules of logic and so are condemned to make the mistakes this causes.

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