We are obviously not wired for logic. (I speak as a former teacher of the subject, as well as a current often futile supplicant on its merits to the courts.) I wonder what the evolutionary advantage is in thinking like that? Or do we survive despite thinking in this half-assed way?
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In Stanislaw Lem's short story, "Golem", the world's first thinking machine delivers a lecture to a packed house of scientists from every discipline.
Although the assembled are eagerly waiting to hear solutions to pressing human problems (war, leukemia, etc) the machine instead offers a philosophical meditation on the limitations of the human mind - limitations it does not share but finds fascinating nonetheless.
At one point, the computer states (paraphrasing from memory now) "you have come down so recently from the trees that you still carry the memory and habits of that life within you. Yet these habits of thought and action exist in the world of nuclear weapons, industrialization and other products of your restless curiosity. So it can be said that natural man is a hazard to himself in the present circumstance and for humanity to survive, natural man must die. There is no going back to the trees for you and that is your great tragedy."
This is my favorite Lem story (though Solaris lingers as a deep and never forgotten dream) because it describes beautifully, through the literary device of the artificial intelligence, our perplexed state, overwhelmed by the very things and situations our own actions collectively create.
Logic is not always useful as it can become a closed loop of self-reinforcing thought and therefore a trap.
So it's not necessarily a bad thing that we do not excel at it.
Our true challenge is the lack of self-correcting iterations of belief, malleable to new information. We're stubborn creatures, often preferring our ideologies to the facts around us.
This is why science and engineering provide such valuable models: I can say all day and night that I can make indestructible paper. I might even write a clever treatise on the topic. But if other researchers, following my techniques, are unable to duplicate my supposed success the jig is up.
Compare this to economics, politics, religion and the humanities in which debates from centuries past often resurface and are recycled with no definitive resolution.
We cannot replace political process with the scientific method obviously so we're just going to have to muddle through somehow.
DRM
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