page_title: Popper and After
section_title: Sabotaging Logical Expressions
hierarchical_section_title: Popper and After / Part one / Sabotaging Logical Expressions
caption_attribution_description: English: Original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toys. Clockwise from bottom left: Tigger, Kanga, Edward Bear (a.k.a Winnie-the-Pooh), Eeyore, and Piglet. Roo was also one of the original toys but he was lost during the 1930s in an apple orchard somewhere in Sussex. Owl and Rabbit were not based on toys. Gopher was made up for the Disney version. Deutsch: Original Winnie-the-Pooh Stofftiere. Im Uhrzeigersinn von unten links: Tigger, Kanga, Edward Bear (auch bekannt als Winnie-the-Pooh), Eeyore und Piglet. Roo war auch eines der ursprünglichen Spielzeuge, aber er wurde in den 1930er Jahren in einem Apfelgarten irgendwo in Sussex verloren. Eule und Hase basierten nicht auf Spielzeug. Gopher wurde für die Disney-Version gemacht.
context_page_description: Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists is a book about irrationalism by the philosopher David Stove. First published by Pergamon Press in 1982, it has since been reprinted as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism and Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult.
context_section_description: Chapter two begins with the following, precisely worded definition of logical expression.
  I will call a statement a "logical" one, or a "statement of logic" if and only if it implies something about what the logical relation is between certain propositions; and the word or phrase, in virtue of which it has this implication, I will call a "logical expression".
  Stove notes that logical expressions can be sabotaged, just as success-words can be neutralized. He spends some time clarifying the relationship between these phenomena, since they are similar in intention but not, in fact, identical. Rather, they work together in the following way.
  The use of success-words (though neutralized), is of course a device which makes directly for plausibility. Sabotaging logical expressions does not do this, but it is an essential auxiliary to the first device. A writer who often took the implication of truth out of "proved", but never the implication of entailment out of "proof", or who often took the implication of falsity out of "refuted" but never took the implication of inconsistency out of "refutation", would be in a position hopelessly exposed to criticism. Our authors have not been so careless.
  He also articulates the distinction in an informal (and wittily expressed) way, that sabotaging logical expressions is like derailing cognitive achievement en route, so that it can never arrive anywhere; while neutralizing success-words is more like blowing up any cognitive achievement at the destination, so it can never be recognized as having arrived.
  Stove now presents a common method of sabotaging logical expressions in a generalizable form.
  One way to sabotage a logical expression, and the way which is most common in our authors, is to embed a logical statement in a context which can be broadly described as epistemic. A schematic example, and one not likely to occur in our authors, is this: instead of saying "P entails Q", which is of course a logical statement, to say "P entails Q according to most logicians, ancient, medieval, and modern".
  This simple pattern of expression makes historical rather than logical assertions (like an encyclopedia documenting debate, without making any truth-claims about what is said, only that it was said, see de dicto and de re).
  Example:
  Eeyore: Kanga told me Winnie-the-Pooh said, "Pigs can fly."
  Piglet: Well, do you believe it?
  Eeyore: Yes I do, that's exactly the kind of thing Pooh would say. [de dicto] OR
  Eeyore: I don't know, you tell me, you're a pig. [de re]
  Knowledge about what people say is different to knowledge about the matters they discuss. Stove accuses his subjects of making statements about scientific discourse, when their readers expect statements about the science itself.
caption: Pooh and friends
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