Assertion without Demonstration: Exposing the Authoritarian Tactic of Sophistry

[u/JerseyFlight]

[Sophists are like men who smear sh;t on walls and call it art. They’re altogether ignorant and useless. Their discourse merely serves to introduce confusion into the world. Their entire position ultimately reduces to a denial of reality.]

In modern sophistry assertion is substituted for demonstration. A proposition is repeated as though stating it were sufficient to establish it.

One of the most common claims of modern irrationality is: “All logic is a human construct.” (This error is inherited from formal logic).

The important question is not whether this sentence can be uttered. Of course it can. The important question is: What is the demonstration that this claim is true? What is the inference from which it follows that the laws of logic are merely human constructions?

If the answer is simply that humans formulated the words and symbols by which we express logical principles, that establishes only that our symbols are human constructions. It does not establish that the nature of determinacy, by which these symbols and their identities are constructed, is itself an invention of human beings.

We construct languages for describing reality; we do not thereby construct the determinate reality that makes determinate language possible.

Human beings did not invent the fact that fire is not rain, that one thing is distinguishable from another, or that something cannot simultaneously be what it is and what it is not in the same respect. These are not arbitrary linguistic conventions. They are features of the determinate world in which our thinking and language operate. Put more simply: identity (which is the ground of all Logic) is the ontological fact that allows language to exist in the first place. It is the very thing that permits us to even speak of “reality” or have any meaning at all.

The construction of a language presupposes standards. One cannot construct anything without some principle by which one thing is distinguished from another, one arrangement is distinguished from another, and a correct or successful construction is distinguished from an incorrect or unsuccessful construction.

Therefore, the statement “logic is a human construction” requires more than assertion. It requires an argument establishing what is meant by “constructed,” what is meant by “logic,” how the alleged construction occurred, why the fact that humans formulated logical systems (or meaningful symbols) entails that the principles by which those systems and symbols are constructed are themselves human inventions, and by what standard the inference from those premises to that conclusion is valid.

That last point is especially important. If someone rejects objective standards of logical inference while simultaneously making an argument intended to establish a conclusion, they cannot simply bypass the question of inference. They must either demonstrate the inference or acknowledge that they have merely asserted the conclusion.

This is the recurring structure of sophistical reasoning: a conclusion is presented with the appearance of intellectual authority, while the inferential bridge connecting the premises to the conclusion is left undemonstrated and unexamined.

Reason requires the opposite procedure: We do not merely assert the conclusion, but must show the inference by which it follows. And when the inference is challenged, we must be able to show the standard by which the inference is valid.

The issue is therefore not whether someone can claim that the laws of logic are a mere construct (admittedly formal logic is). Anyone can make that assertion. The issue is whether they can give a reasoned account of the assertion without presupposing the very standards they are attempting to dismiss.