It doesn’t mean that you won’t ever try, and that nobody else will, it’s just that right now you’ve decided this is your starting point and is the basis of your logical system, or your belief system.

encapsulate the most important building block of logical arguments: logical implication.

It is important to note that this is logically different from concluding that the hypothesis is false, which would be the opposite rather than the negation. If you have insufficient evidence to support a hypothesis, it means that the truth value is still unknown. Maybe you need more data. Maybe you need a better experiment.

many arguments in real life go wrong because of problems with the groundwork rather than with the argument per se.

Like time, logic has a direction and we must not try to violate it.

The key is to remember that it is both statements “A” and “A implies B” that together allow us to infer statement B. So if statement B is not true it is either because A isn’t true or because “A implies B” isn’t true. The possibility of the implication being untrue is often overlooked.

The idea of logic is to have clear rules so that conclusions can be drawn unambiguously and consistently by different people.

In that situation the key would be to change someone’s mind about that core principle rather than anything else.

If they are attempting to be logical, the first person will try to justify what they’re saying by constructing a logical argument to back it up. The second person should then either try to find a flaw in their logical argument, or try to construct their own logical argument to back up their assertion that the person is wrong.