A description about the book Being Logical, D.Q McInerny

2. Attitudes, points of view and practical
procedures whose adoption preapares the mind
for a successful engagement with logic.

3. 1.
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9.
Be attentive
Get the facts straight
Ideas and the objects of ideas
Be mindful of the origins of
ideas
Match ideas to facts
Match words to ideas
Effective communication
Avoid vague and ambiguous
language
Truth

4. - Pay attention.
- Don’t just hear, listen.
- Don’t just look, see.
- The little things are not to be
ignored.
- Train yourself to focus on details.
- Attention demands an active,
energetic response to every situation,
to the persons, places, and things that

5. - A facts is something made or done.
- There are 2 basic types of objectives facts,
things and events.
- Facts can also be thought of as objective
or subjective. But things and events are
objective facts, they exist in the public
domain; a subjective fact is one that is
limited to the subject experiencing it.

6. - An idea is the subjective evocation of an
objective fact.
- The control we have over our ideas is not
absolute, it is real.
- Our ideas are the means, not the ends, of
our knowledge, they link us to the world,
if they are clear ideas the links are strong

7. - The idea in the mind, as we have seen, is a
subjective fact, but the kind of the fact we
are concerned with establishing is objective
fact.

8. - The basic components to human
knowledge are:
1. An objective fact
2. The idea of the fact
3. The word that we apply to the idea
- Bad ideas can be informative, not about
the objective world; but about the subject
state of the persons who nourish those
ideas

9. - Ideas as such are not communicable from
one mind to another.
- Putting the right word to an idea is not an
automatic process, and sometimes it can be
quite challenging.

10. - Language and logic are inextricable bound
up with each other.
- It is impossibe to have clear
communication without clear thinking.
- Matching words to ideas is the first and
most basic step in communication. The nex
step is putting ideas toguether to form

11. - Usually the context in wich a general
term appears will allow your audience to
figure out its referent, but if you have any
doubts about that use a specific term.
- The only way to avoid ambiguity is to
spell things out as explicity as possible.

12. - The whole purpose of
reasoning of logic is to arrive
at the truth of things.
- Truth has 2 basic forms:
- Ontological truth
- Logical truth

13. Assimilate the principles to the point
where they become.

14. 1. First principles
2. Real gray areas, manufactured
gray areas
3. Explanation for everything,
eventually
4. Don't stop short in the search
for causes
5. Distinguish among causes
6. Define your terms
7. The categorical statement
8. Generalizing

15. - Logic as a science, has its first principles,
but logic stands in a unique relationship to
all other science because the first principle
of logic apply not just to logic but to all
the science.
Other first principles are:
• The principle of identity
• The principles of the excluded
middle
• The principle of sufficient
reason
• The principle of contradiction

16. - A gray area is a situation in
wich the truth cannot be
clearly established.
- Gray area exists as gray
only because there are the
distinct alternatives of
black and white.

17. A good part of our energies as
rational creatures is devoted to the
search causes. We want to know why
things happen.
!!!
???

18. Sometimes our
failure to find the
root causes of
things is for simple
lazyness. We don´t
investigate enough

19. The efficient causes is an agent whose
activity bring something into existence or
that modifies its existence in one way or
another.

20. The process of definition, the mechanics of
it, is the way we relate a particular object
to other and thereby give it a precise
location.
The logical definition of terms is a 2 step:
1. Place the term to be defined in its,
“proximate genus”
2. Identify the terms specific difference

21. - The purpose of the reasoning
process, logic’s principal
concern, is demostration.
- An argument will only be as
good as the statement of wich it
is composed, and those
statement , in turn will only be
as good as the terms of wich
they are composed.
- The most effective argument is
one whose conclusion is a
categorical statement.

22. - A general statement is one whose subject is
very large in scope. Such a statement is not
neccesarily inaccurate.
- Explicit language in general statements is
important because it guards against any
possible confusion on the part of an
audience.