 Well, chances are, if you're watching this video, then you don't know how to reason. Now, I'm not trying to be insulting even though I've probably have done a very good job of that by now. All I mean, well, what I don't mean, I don't mean that you lack the capacity to reason, right? You have a brain, you have the ability to gather evidence, that sort of thing. What I mean is that you don't have a particular set of skills, right? You know, think about it. You know, I'm not, you know, suppose you don't know how to play basketball, right? It's not that you don't have the capacity to play basketball. You just don't know how to play the game, or ride a bicycle, or swim. I mean, all these are different sets of skills. And so all I mean when I say that you don't know how to reason is that you, especially if you're watching these videos, chances are you probably don't have the skills necessary to reason. Now in this series of videos, I'm going to provide instruction in logic, right? It can be pretty broad. I'm going to cover a wide range of different skills in logical inference. You know, starting real basic to meanings of terms to propositional logic, syllogisms, fallacies, right? I probably even go further than that. So I'm trying to provide instruction in inductive reason. So basics and maybe not so much statistics, and we can have an entire course on that, but maybe what's going to count as relevant evidence. Maybe even drift off to soundness completeness proofs or a set theory. I probably even will you know, maybe drift off in the odd tangent and metaphysics or philosophy of language when time permits. I promise, though, to restrain myself. Maybe. And now I said that logic is a set of skills. So you might wonder what sort of skills are involved. Well, logic is a set of skills that allows you to draw conclusions to infer conclusions from evidence. And you know, there's really good ways of doing this, really bad ways of doing this. You know, logic is not merely knowing the truth, right? You know, supposing we had, or, you know, reason is not merely knowing the truth. Suppose we had some sort of infallible machine that can answer every question completely accurately, you know. You can ask the machine what's the diameter of the earth? What's the nature of justice? What's the distance from here to Decatur? And the machine could tell you the diameter of the earth or the nature of justice or the distance from here to Decatur. It still would not be the use of reason. Yeah, that's just simply having the true answer, but you haven't reached the true answer. I mean, you don't know why that's the true answer. You know, if you want to measure the diameter of the earth, when you figure out the curvature of the earth and the distance of that curve and, you know, use a little bit of geometry and blemol. You've got a reasonable calculation of the diameter of the earth or to know the nature of justice. What do you do? You start listing instances of justice and injustice and, you know, instances or events that are not a just nor unjust, and you try to figure out what all the instances of justice have in common that, and only those instances of justice have in common that the other two don't, and there you go. You've got the nature of justice. Or, you know, if you want to find out the distance from here to Decatur, start with a unit of measurement and start walking and count, right? Now, that's the use of reason. Not just simply being told what to believe. So, you know, reasoning, though, it requires effort. It's not something that's instantly gratifying and it's certainly not foolproof. It's going to be hard work. It's going to be hard work. It's going to be frustrating to go through the process, to learn from your mistakes, and even to be able to recognize when you make mistakes. That's going to require a lot. Now, I suppose you could reject this, right? I suppose you could reject the skills of reason, but, you know, what do you do then? You just start believing things and stick with it? I mean, you can do that, but you're not using your mind. Even if you were to be informed by the infallible machine, you're still not using your mind. Now, if you want to use your mind, you have to use logic.