Bacon said:

"History makes people wise; poetry makes people smart; mathematics makes people thoughtful; natural philosophy makes people profound; ethics makes people solemn; logic and rhetoric make people good. Debate."

When it comes to logic, many people intuitively think that it is a foreign subject that is difficult to learn.

Western style mainly stems from its Western origin. The world's first logic work was Aristotle's "On Instruments", and he also had an inquisitive disciple named Socrates.

The difficulty in learning may be due to proficiency in reasoning. Most masters who are good at argumentation appear on stage and behind the scenes. For example, when you see Watson's watch, you know that he has an alcoholic brother. Ma Weiwei, the queen of pearls.

And in our daily lives, we encounter more mass logic producers who "do not convert, you are not Chinese" and "you go up, you go up".

Without living examples of how to apply what you have learned, "difficulty" can easily become a logical excuse.

From my description above, you can also feel that although not everyone has studied logic, everyone naturally has a set of self-contained logic.

Logic is the pre-installed program of the brain.

Seeing this, you may want to ask who installed the program for us?

Human beings have always had a natural tendency to want to grasp the laws of development of things.

In the past, when we saw wind, rain, lightning and thunder, our ancestors would create various myths and fables to explain it. Later, with the development of science, we tried to explore objective laws to prove the real world.

The driving force behind all of these is the same: our desire to understand and grasp this complex world in an abstract, consistent, simple and beautiful way.

So, when you were very young, you saw your mother putting apples and oranges together and socks and clothes in a pile. As time goes by and you read more, you will come up with a set of abstract classification methods for separating food and use without having to be taught by your mother.

This is called inductive classification in logic.

When you grow up, you will be at home by yourself. Hearing a loud noise in the kitchen, you hurried to check and found that the cheese on the table had fallen to the floor.

At this time, apart from you, there is only a cat standing on the table and barking, and a bird in the cage jumping up and down. The cage is locked and the windows are closed. Who touched my cheese?

At this time, you may not need any three-stage reasoning to come to the conclusion in one second: the cats are causing trouble again.

And this is called deductive reasoning in logic.

So, you see, logic is not that difficult, nor is it that far away from us. It is a thinking activity that our brains are always using, always making judgments, and 24 hours a day.

What we lack is a methodology to check and correct the seemingly correct assertions and the "I think" that are taken for granted when we hear the so-called expert authority and when we are arguing with others.

And this requires learning some logic.

"Simple Logic" can be regarded as an introductory book. The author, Mike Rennie, is a famous logic professor in the United States.

Apart from Lian Yue’s recommendation and Douban’s rating, there are only two reasons why I was able to spend enough time to read it and make a mind map.

First, the content is easy to understand, and second, the expression is close to life.

(The map is placed at the end of the article. If you are in a hurry, you can just pull it to the end and take it away for yourself)

First, let’s talk about it being easy to understand.

The book is very thin, less than 300 pages, and there is basically no brain-burning content.

When talking about the mental preparation for learning logic at the beginning, the concepts such as "confirming facts" and "avoiding evasive language" proposed by the author are all familiar to us, but they are important and may be ignored by us.

For example, you may know what the objective facts are, but you may not know what the subjective facts are.

You may often talk about freedom and equality with your friends, but you may not define the connotation and denotation of these words before discussing. Then, both sides have been using evasive language to conduct so-called exchanges of views.

Another example: a good argument = correct content + correct structure.

The correct content should have two elements: true and effective.

The simplest structure is the syllogism. That is: every A belongs to B, every B belongs to C, so every A belongs to C.

Now let's construct an argument. If your girlfriend says to you:

"You are mine" - A belongs to B

"Your credit card is yours" - B belongs to C

After analysis, we can see that in this argument, your girlfriend has a complete and correct logical structure.

But the correctness of the content of the proposition "You are mine" may yet to be confirmed...

As I said at the beginning, life is not logical everywhere.

In the process of reading this book, you will often have "Oh, it's so simple!", "I know it too!" "Isn't this what high school is? !”....Wait for the thigh-slapping exclamation.

But this is just an illusion.

Because you will find that those things you "think" you know may be "taken for granted".

Without the training process of multiple personal arguments, it may be difficult for you to climb out of the pit of logical fallacies.

Imagine a scenario:

Your baby was beaten up by a naughty neighbor’s kid. You were very angry, so you went to the other parent to reason with you.

As a result, the other mother spread her hands and said confidently: "It's not because your child took his child's toys first."

...At this time You, who are self-restrained, may be speechless, but you are unable to refute at the moment.

"Because they XXX first, we should also XXX." This eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-tooth sentence pattern can be called a robber in logic.

In logic, they are called "violence for violence".

That is: using wrong precedents to deduce future conclusions to cover up your own wrong behavior. In short, even if I am wrong, I cannot prove that you are right.

Consciously apply the logic you learned into your life.

Maybe you can say something next time: "If you have the ability, you can prove that beating my child is right!"

The author said in the book:

Logic is a science, but it is also an art. The thing about art is that it is the starting point for action and thinking in our lives.

Indeed. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

Finally, I quote the words of Kopi, the author of "Introduction to Logic":

Learning logic does not necessarily mean you can have good reasoning, just like an anthropologist. An Olympic champion who knows how to run fast but doesn't understand the anatomy of the human body can run faster than an anthropologist.

People who have studied logic must be able to avoid more logical errors and be better able to distinguish between sophistry and reason than those who have not.

Logic cannot make our original lives better, but it can make our lives better.

I think this is the correct logic.