Why do logicians talk like robots?
Believe it or not, there’s a very good reason for this. (And it’s not because logicians are robots!) In the process of critiquing ideas and their relationships, logicians customarily state those ideas in a bare-bones format. This helps ensure that nothing gets hidden or lost, that all essential points are clear, that the evaluation is as free as possible of irrelevancy and ambiguity, and that the function and relationship of each statement with respect to the whole is evident. Thus evaluation and comparison of similar or competing ideas is as fair and objective as possible. To convert a statement to a standard form that is easy to analyze, compare, and contrast, it is customary, first of all, to convert everything to present tense (provided, of course, that time relationships are not a relevant factor in the argument). Thus, “I bought apples yesterday because they were on sale” becomes “I buy apples because they are on sale.” Next, we break complex statements down into units, and state
