2. Logic Junkie

In Three Uses of the Knife (2002), dramatist David Mamet describes how important is the art of logic to the human animal. It is our nature to elaborate perception into hypotheses and then reduce those hypotheses to information upon which we can act. It is our special adaptive device, equivalent to the bird’s flight – our unique survival tool. And drama, music and art are our celebration of that tool, exactly like the woodcock’s manic courting flight, the whale’s breaching leap. The excess of ability/energy/skill/strength/love is expressed in species-specific ways. In goats it is leaping, in humans it is making art. (65) This statement is fundamental to the craft of dramatic writing. Mamet identifies logic as an instinct, a species-specific skill that has evolved in the human animal to allow us dominion over our surroundings, and ensure our survival. Boyd agrees – ‘Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche”: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence.’