Articles From The Classical Teacher

People Are Not Computers
by Martin Cothran (about him)

In last winter’s issue of The Classical Teacher, I wrote about a thesis that I have been propounding for some time: logic is not math. I said that logic, far from being mathematical, is a language art. I argued that the common belief that logic is a species of math was gravely mistaken, and that we classical educators should realize that since the classical trivium is language study, logic is a part of language study.

I would like to offer a corollary to my original thesis. This related belief is not so much a belief as it is an attitude.

At a recent homeschool conference at which I was speaking, I walked by one of the booths in the exhibit hall. I noticed that the representatives of a prominent publisher of thinking skills curricula were outfitted with laboratory smocks—the sheer white coats that you might see someone in a computer lab wearing.

I went immediately back to my booth and told my wife (who was helping me that day) that I planned on getting a booth directly adjacent to the laboratory people at the next conference, and that I was going to stand in front of my booth wearing a horse hair robe and sandles.

She explained to me that, in that case, I would be doing the next convention by myself.

Although I have since bowed to the common sense advice of my dear wife and given up the idea of the robe and sandles, I still maintain that it would be a nice way to make an important philosophical point: people are not computers.

How we have come to think that they are is a matter of speculation. One likely source is Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher who popularized the idea of the world as a giant mechanism. Descartes believed that things in the objective world were merely quantitative, and that the qualitative things of the world (things like meaning and purpose) were the subjective products of the mind. This attitude about the nature of the world was summed up succinctly when someone said to me recently, “We could sum up the universe if only we had a big enough hard drive.”

Now if the world as a whole is merely a giant mechanism—a thing that can be summed up in so many megabytes, then every particular thing in it can be thought of in this way. And since man is a thing in the universe, he can therefore be regarded as a mere part of this Cartesian mechanism.

This is the attitude of the people who constantly insist that computers can someday be taught to “think.” If, after all, thinking beings (like man) can be thought of as computers, then, of course, computers can be thought of as thinking beings. But computers will never be taught to think because thinking involves the ability to apprehend the natures of things. How can this be programmed into a computer?

Only when the world becomes mathematicized, only when we think that it can even be conceived of without appeal to meaning and purpose, can we feel truly comfortable in donning white coats in preparation for teaching people how to think.

Our language reflects what we are. And if we begin to think that we can accurately and adequately represent what we think and speak in some mathematical, quantitative, symbolic calculus, as systems of modern logic would have us believe we can, then we have joined the Cartesians, uniformed in white coats.

Traditional logic does not allow us to think this way. Traditional logic is based on the assumption that people are not merely thinking machines, but rational beings created in the image of God who have been given the ability to apprehend the natures of things.

Now that I have thought about this a little further, the idea of the robe and sandals seems even more appealing. My wife assures me, however, that if I really were to follow through on my threat, there are people who would come and take me away.

And they would be wearing white coats too.

Martin Cothran is the author of Traditional Logic I and Traditional Logic II, as well as Material Logic.