Kettle logic

Kettle logic (la logique du chaudron in the original French) is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other.

Jacques Derrida uses this expression in reference to the humorous ″kettle-story″, that Sigmund Freud relates in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

The name ″logique du chaudron″ derives in Jacques Derrida from an example used by Sigmund Freud for the analysis of ″Irma's dream″ in The Interpretation of Dreams and in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.

The three arguments are inconsistent, and Freud notes that it would have been better if he had only used one.

The kettle "logic" of the dream-work is related to what Freud calls the embarrassment-dream of being naked, in which contradictory opposites are yoked together in the dream. Freud said that in a dream, incompatible (contradictory) ideas are simultaneously admitted. Freud also presented various examples of how a symbol in a dream can bear in itself contradictory sexual meanings.

To expand on the kettle logic of dreams, one should understand the relationship between kettle logic itself and the nature of contradiction. Kettle logic, although a tool that may be simply noticed, is meant to present itself as truth. In other words, kettle logic is a way of combining contradictions to make a case. These contradictory arguments are put together next to each other; they are presented as if the contradictions themselves do not exist. This relates to one of Freud's views on dreams. An example of this is the aforementioned dream of being naked. This is one aspect of the "exorbitant" logic of dreaming, where the logic itself lies closely to illogical thought.

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