Alternative Logic

            I’ll bet you saw this headline and thought, “Aha! Joni’s going to give us some examples of people not thinking clearly, like when she shares misspelled signs and such.”  Now, maybe those weren’t the exact words you were thinking, but this is what you expected right?

            That’s exactly what I’d have thought, too-- but no!  There is actually a college course by this very name.  WHO WOULD SIGN UP TO LEARN LOGIC OTHER THAN GOOD LOGIC?  Pardon me for finding irony here, but doesn’t this course sound like the very definition of NOT good logic?  

            And if my keyboard had the symbol for “not” on it, I would paste it here for your enjoyment.  Sadly, I do not have such a keyboard.  But take it from me, it looks like a fat little # 7 with a wide top.  Like a mirror image of a “divided by” thingy.

            Correction.  I just called the son who is taking this course, and learned an amazing thing.  You and I can now access the symbol for “not” by holding down the ALT key and typing 0172.  Here is what it looks like:  ¬ . ~ can also mean “not” (or “about,” which is ¬ the same thing, now, is it?)  

          

          Let me be the first to expose this course for what it really is: Thievery.  Yessir, right here in River City.  And they do call Sacramento that, from time to time.  Not Thievery, but River City. We even have a baseball team called the River Cats. 

But back to the stealing.  This said son, at UC Davis, is double majoring in geology and philosophy and the latter because he loves math and logic.  He came over, recently, and showed me HARD EVIDENCE of what I’m talking about.

These people think they can appropriate anything they want, willy nilly.  They are using not only letters and numbers, but Greek letters now, upper and lower case, the ampersand, all kinds of mathematical symbols, upside-down Vs and As, backwards Es, squares, diamonds—pillaging and plundering every which way they can.  I fully expect hearts and curly cues to be next.

And no one is stopping them.  They are snatching up all the letters and shapes we have grown up understanding, and printing up textbooks that give them whole new (and very confusing, if you ask me) meanings.  They sit around and smile at sentences like, “Only only children like only only children.”  Think about that for a few minutes and try not to get a headache.

Here is Frege, the guy who started this. 

 

And here is Kripke, the guy who began pickpocketing shapes like diamonds and squares. 

He is a philosopher who is so arrogant, that when someone suggested he get a Ph.D., he said, “Who could examine me?”  So of course he felt justified ripping off pre-schoolers’ shapes and letters.  He is the father of entitlement, I tell you. 

And now these people are writing complicated formulas that are literally Greek, mixed with diamonds and doodles.  And they’re coming over to their mother’s houses and leaving chaos in their wake. I’ll tell you what this is. ¬ fun.

I’ll tell you what is fun—seeing the look of delight on the faces of loved ones when you give them my new books for Christmas.  Check ‘em out, right here on the home page!