The Limits of Logic: Why Narrative Thinking is Better Suited to the Demands of Modern Combat
Angus Fletcher and Thomas Gaines | 10.19.21
It’s an easy morning outside Washington, DC. But we’re making things hard on an Army student.
“Good plan,” we say. “Now give us another.”
The student’s brow furrows. What he’s wondering is: Why would I come up with another plan when my first plan is good? But he’s a dutiful soldier, so he tries to comply. And it’s there that he hits his real mental block: How do I come up with another plan when my first plan is good? After all, if nothing is wrong with my first plan, then what could be productively changed?
That the student would think this way is pure logic. Logic’s core teaching is that there’s one optimal decision, one error-free plan. If that plan has been identified already, it’s thus not only pointless but impossible to come up with a smart alternative. Yet is logic right about this? Is there always one ideal course of action?
To tease out the answer, let’s start by being precise about logic. Logic has many colloquial meanings, but strictly speaking, it’s the formal system of syllogistic induction and deduction defined by Aristotle in his fourth-century BC masterwork Organon; practiced by philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant to George Boole to William Stanley Jevons to Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell; taught across the globe as data-driven decision-making, evidence-based reasoning, and critical thinking; hardwired into the computer brain (the arithmetic logic unit, or ALU) to generate mathematical spreadsheets, machine-learning protocols, and fact-crunching algorithms; and drilled into the twenty-first-century US military through PowerPoint slides and standard operating procedures.
https://mwi.usma.edu/the-limits-of-logic-why-narrative-thinking-is-better-suited-to-the-demands-of-modern-combat/
