Part of philosophy is breaking down situations into separate parts and looking to see if the statement flow is logical. In the abstract that looks like:
If A
And if B
Then C must be true
A more concrete example is: If I’m a man, and I have brown hair, then I am a man with brown hair. At the same time, we can check if a statement is false by using the same framework. If the conclusion is I am a man with blonde hair but statement B says I’m a man with brown hair, then this conclusion is false.
Philosophy is a way to break statements down in order to arrive at the truth. Even if both the abstract and the more concrete examples don’t make much sense, don’t worry. Philosophy is kind of hard to make sense of, but today I had a practical example.
Client Assertions Aren’t Always True
Today I had a client email their assessment of a particular situation that went something like this:
I’m having trouble with this software. It’s because of the version I’m using, right?
In a moment of high-speed responses I looked at the way the question was posed, and my understanding of the software, and agreed with the client’s conclusion. Upon further inspection I realized the client had led me astray, I fell into a logical fallacy trap.
Basically, the client said:
If A
Then B
Looking at it quickly, I said, “Yes, you’re right.”
But the client wasn’t right because A and B weren’t even related. Instead, the issue was a little more complicated and required doing a little bit of research. By following a logical fallacy that I had assumed was correct, I was led to making a mistake. I remedied the situation in a timely manner, but learned an even more valuable lesson: Don’t always trust the client to follow logical steps correctly.
Fixing the issue required thinking through the steps, surveying the possible solutions, and doing the task myself. In the future, I know to trust my ability to guide myself through logical steps, even if the answer seems to be apparent. After all, the client’s not always right…