David Kellogg On Logic And Tone

David Kellogg wrote to sys-func on 9 Mar 2024, at 08:19:

Not one of the responses has really taken up b), the argument which says that logic cannot be "applied" directly to scientific problems, because the level of organisation at which and the concepts and data to which the logic must be applied are radically different, so logic itself develops as we move from arithmetic to statistics, and still more as we move from math to physics to chemistry to biology to socio-psychology to semiotics.

Now, in itself, these data points suggest to me that...well, that we are human, and the "tone" in which something is said is not simply part of the grammar (Halliday and Greaves, 2009) but also part of our semantics and part of the context of situation Chris's attempt to imagine argumentation where tone is not an essential part of the argument is chimerical. …

Halliday would say it somewhat differently: he would say that "logical" arguments, and even my meta-logical argument, are just everyday language (i.e. my aggressively intoned argument) which has been "tidied up", and he would probably agree that tidying up "tone" is, in the long run, impossible for humans to do: it is literally like trying to speak without any intonation at all.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, logical validity is argument–internal, since it is concerned with premisses and the reasoning from premisses to conclusions. Logical validity, therefore, does not vary with the field in which it is applied.

[2] To be clear, logical validity is a means of distinguishing arguments that are valid from arguments that are fallacious. Applied to scientific problems, logical validity is a means of distinguishing scientific solutions that rest on arguments that are valid from scientific solutions that rest on arguments that are fallacious.

[3] To be clear, this confuses the phonological system of TONE with tone in the sense of 'tone policing'.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. ChRIS — whose PhD thesis was on phonology — did not attempt to imagine argumentation without intonation. He simply informed the sys-func subscribers of the logical fallacy known as tone policing:

Tone policing – focusing on emotion behind (or resulting from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.