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Even if logic is the best tool available for systematizing and correlating truth, it doesn't make it appropriate to every situation. Like buying a house ... there are visceral factors there that it would be absurd to try to anaylize. Or playing Street Fighter, where the sheer amount of data that has to corraborated makes the task impossible.
The value of the tool is the realm of the ideal, where the discussion lives in a defined system. You can set about assuming the "if" part of the statment, prove the "then" part. After that, the task becomes proving that the "if" part is valid in the real world.
My point in all of this is to avoid throwing away the tools. Thinking specifically of "he who is not named" in the politics section. Instead of fighting the duel of data, throwing in fact after fact, it would seem useful to grant the data, but force him to argue the logical structure that makes the data mean what he says it does.
This would hold true in a lot of cases. The data is not always the important thing. The rationality of the case built on the data is often much weaker than the collection of facts.
-sm
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