He cannot present philosophical demonstrations to that person because the latter will just not be able to follow them. Suppose that one wishes to discuss a philosophical question with somebody who has not studied philosophy. The second use is for casual discussions. If debating sharpens the mind, and dialectic is a skill in debating, then the practice of dialectic clearly contributes to sharpening the mind. Even today teachers recommend that promising students becomes involved in their school's debate society. And it is clear that debate sharpens the mind. Even a superficial reading of Plato's dialogues reveals that what he calls dialectic is an art of intellectual debate. Let us take up these uses one at a time.Īristotle thinks that the first use of dialectic is for intellectual training. They are three: intellectual training, casual encounters, and the philosophical sciences.Īristotle here enumerates three different uses for the dialectical art. Aristotle explains it as follows: We must say how many and for what purposes the treatise is useful. Since I want to make sure that our discussion of logic is useful in your intellectual life, the first thing we are going to examine in dialectic is not its nature or definition, but rather its utility. This lesson will examine Aristotle's Topics. Aristotle calls the chief part of discovering logic dialectic and discusses it in a book called the Topics. Thus before we can use the judging part of logic, we need to use the discovering part.
![dialectic example dialectic example](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/wt4echap07-thinkingintelligence-090610134520-phpapp02/95/thinking-intelligence-powerpoint-11-728.jpg)
![dialectic example dialectic example](http://thibonenglish.pbworks.com/f/Dialectical%20Journal%20template.png)
But we also noted in our discussion of demonstration that before we can judge whether a theory is true or false, we need to discover it.
![dialectic example dialectic example](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ex4qg5Q1iKE/TjcasuqD-nI/AAAAAAAABLU/IuS0CchYYmU/s1600/Liberal-Arts.gif)
Judgment always has certitude, and the certitude of judgment can come from either the form of reasoning alone, that is, the syllogism simply, or from the matter of reasoning, as in the demonstrative syllogism. In our last lesson we finished our discussion of the judging part of logic.