A. "Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence"

There are two parts of logic: truth and validity. At first glance, it seems to be more than possible to have both of these aspects; after all, there must be some statements that everyone can agree are true, and there must be a way to combine these statements that allows the creation of a new and unflinchingly true statement.

Let us start with the second aspect of logic, validity, in our examination. Aristotle created the art of syllogisms, the method of combining statements universally acknowledged to be true (premises) to establish new statements that must therefore also be acknowledged as truth. If one followed the syllogism rules he (discovered? created?), one could prove any point one wanted. This seems to make sense: If all of A is B, and all of B is C, then therefore all of A is C. If we accept the premises (all of A is B, all of B is C) of as truth, I doubt many people could successfully argue that the conclusion (all of A is C) is incorrect.

This is from where the "confidence" part of the quote comes. If your premises are correct and you follow the rules of logic, then you can confidently say that your conclusions are correct. (Hm, there seems to be a syllogism of sorts in my previous sentence... Let's hope it's not too invalid.)

So far, the possibility of logic to be right has relied on a very big "if": the ability for any premise to be universally and unequivocally true. It is a question that philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mathematicians (the names "Euclid" and "Lobachevski" ring any bells?) have grappled with for ages. Some people may think that of course there are unquestionably true premises: two parallel lines will never touch each other. They say that such statements are self evidently true, and by slowly building off of these sorts of premises all sorts of arguments may be made.

Now, these arguments may be valid and may appear to be true, but will we ever really *know* if something is true? If a statement is self evidently true, it's a statement that can't be proven, and if it can't be proven, how can we ever know for a fact that it's true? The answer is, we can't. We can only instinctually believe that they're true, and the whole point of logic is to eliminate instinctual belief in favor of hard, cold, scientific proof. There will always be a challenge to any premise, and if we can't prove a premise, how are we supposed let it go and believe that it's self evidently true? These premises are possibilities, and usually very likely ones, but we can't ever definitively know their truthfulness.

Our logical arguments may be valid, sound arguments that would be true if the premises were true. However, no premise can ever unequivocally be proven true, and therefore any logical argument may be considered (at least partly) false. An arguer can be confident, but they can't be definitively correct.