No, I don't mean kidnapping (by grey neotenous aliens with a penchant for wasting time on hopelessly backward planets, or of children who tragically end up on milk cartons, or of the passengers and crew of freighters by pirates off the coast of Somalia). "Abduction" is a term used in logic for reasoning backward from the consequent to the antecedent, say, by contrast with the more popularly understood spectator sport of "deduction," wherein you know that A implies B, and that furthermore, A is true, so you triumphantly proclaim "B" (but not *too* B), and everyone goes home happy, except the people who are annoyed by logic generally, which is practically everyone.
Abduction, though, is
important, because I've found that, in a world in which you can almost assume
a priori that anything you're told officially is an egregious lie, it's the one effective workhorse of a thinking tool that lets you figure out what the
<fill in bad place, here> is actually going on. (Not that it ever proves useful to know, if you, like I, happen not to be one of the self-designated "masters of the universe" who want to replace God in that capacity, and since God has accorded them free will, and something (genetics, apparently, or childhood abuse) has deprived them of empathy and filled the vacuum with Schadenfreude, they do pretty much manage to run the show temporally, and knowing won't help you a bit. "Talk to the hand" is yesterday's popular, all-purpose obnoxious expression, but here, it's more a matter of: talk into the barrel of a gigantic rocket launcher; see what good it does you.)
Still, for those of you still with me (the null set cohort who bother to read these posts), it's still a remarkably interesting kind of reasoning to be able to do, and the methodology, together with some conclusions, will be the subject of the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment