Guide to Critical Thinking

Moral of the Story: The Importance of Language in Logic
Clarity, precision, and correctness in language are not only important to the practical quest of 
communicating your ideas to others; they are fundamental to the practice of logical reasoning.
har85668_01_c01_001-024.indd 19
4/9/15 11:20 AM
© 2015 Bridgepoint Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Not for resale or redistribution.

---

Section 1.6 
Logic and Philosophy
The Goal of Philosophy
Now that the practical nature of philo-
sophical inquiry has been demonstrated, 
we can move to a more fruitful exami-
nation of what exactly philosophy is. In 
one view, philosophy is the activity of 
clarifying ideas. It is an activity because 
philosophy is not fundamentally a body 
of knowledge (as is history or biology, 
for example) but rather an activity. The 
goal of philosophical activity is to clarify 
ideas in the quest for truth.
How does one clarify ideas? By asking 
questions—especially “why?,” “what 
does that mean?,” and “what do you 
mean?” Philosophers have observed 
that asking such questions may be a 
natural human inclination. Consider any 
2-year-old. As he or she begins to com-
mand the use of language, the child’s quest seems to be an attempt to understand the world by 
identifying what things are called. This may be annoying to some adults, but if we understand 
this activity as philosophical, the child’s goal is clear: Names are associated with meanings, and 
this process of making distinctions and comparisons of similarity is essentially the philosophical 
mechanism for learning (Sokolowski, 1998).
Once we name things, we can distinguish things that are similar because names help us sepa-
rate things that appear alike. To a 2-year-old, a toy car and a toy truck may appear similar—both 
are vehicles, for example, and have four tires—but their different names reflect that there are 
also differences between them. So a 2-year-old will most likely go on to ask questions such as 
why a car is not the same as a truck until she grasps the fundamental differences between these 
two things. This is the truth-seeking nature of philosophy.