Does logic reveal something about the structure of reality itself, or is it better understood as a human tool shaped by our contingent cognitive and linguistic practices?
Can we really know, or are all positions (whether an Aristotelian-style account of logic as grounded in the structure of being, or a Rortyan emphasis on contingent factors), just intuitions bolstered by post hoc justifications?
I’ve often found theistic presuppositional arguments interesting: the claim that logic needs a foundation or grounding in God, and the related claim that physicalism can’t adequately account for intelligibility.
My limited understanding of enactivism suggests that logical thinking starts from how our bodies interact with the world. Living things first learn how to deal with their environment by picking up simple patterns: what stays the same and what changes, what’s safe and what’s dangerous, and what can be repeated and what can’t. More complex ways of thinking, including logic, then develop and build on these basic patterns of experience and action. No doubt this won’t be good enough for those who see logic as revealing something more profound about the nature of reality itself (and no doubt there are variations between enactivist thinkers).
But if logic originates as a social, linguistic, and normative refinement of embodied sense-making, why does it seem to map onto the world more broadly? Is this down to our particular vantage point, in the way that it appears that the sun revolves around the earth, since we are the ones situated in the middle of our own schemas and practices?
Can I pick both ? We can understand logic as a human tool for cooperative coping that is also “out there” in the way the world shows itself. But it’s hard to do this if we presuppose that meaning and logic are “in mind stuff” that somehow hovers over “non-mind stuff.”
If beliefs are motivated, part of a private solution to the problem of existence, can they also be warranted ? My motivated belief is that warrant is itself a matter of motivated, situated judgment.
I think the temporality is more tangled than “first hunch” then “legalistic case-making.”
Gadamer slapped me with the following thesis. A deepening knowledge of the object is a deepening knowledge of myself as knower. We always “project” a “total meaning” on the stranger, the text, the noise in the woods. As we zoom in, these projections collide with new experience, and only then do they become “visible.” As our projections. As maybe the deepest part of us, the stuff we can’t even check if we want to, until we collide with the object.
If you think of its evolution as toward the world making sense, then it weirdly makes sense that we can’t tell the world apart from our telling of the world.
Except that the process described above continues. Our telling of the world becomes “visible” as “error” — as “just us” and “not the not-us world” — when it collides with the unexpected.
Even this division of “us” from “not us” looks like part of that telling of the world.
Thank you ! It was fun to watch it pour out. To me there’s jazz in philosophy.
Sure. People often talk of warrantedness as if an “absolute” or “a-perspectival” property that a belief does or does not have. But to me it’s a judgement, which needs a judge.
A judge is situated and motivated, always prejudiced. Which is just to have a “stand-point,” a singular “view” on the judged situation, which is “there” in the way the situation “shows itself” to that judge. Do claims exist in some other way ? As “heard by no one” or by a witness without prejudice ? But a witness without prejudice is no longer a witness we can understand, if prejudice is understood in a neutral sense of “the past as it approaches the present in terms of a desired-projected future.”
Is the desire for a human-transcending authority a flight from time itself ? A desire to cancel or possess the power of the future ? When philosophers invoke divine immaterial logic or automated critical thinking, what do they want ? To settle a few issues forever ? From “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” to “a wall there is that never fails.” Or: Not I but Logic through me.
“Anti-philosophers” highlight this flight from time and chance, and then install their own divine logic, like “difference.” The anti-systematic congeals into another system.
But weirdly the impulse is plausibly explained pragmatically. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an indestructible tool that remains useful forever? And this is a nice gift to offer your tribe. “Anti-philosophy” has purchase as philosophy, as claims intended to endure in their virtue.
Within and as part of present human contingencies we dream of something beyond them, and perhaps that “beyond” is tacitly the stormy future of human contingencies that have not arrived and can’t be predicted.
Logic is like the form of all possible experience. If I can find that form now, then I die knowing the “essence” of the future. Even explicitly “temporal” thinkers like Heidegger couldn’t resist this project, even as they understood it. Their understanding it was a practicing of that very project, a hunt for the logic of logic.
Thank you. I think we largely create ourselves in conversation. Where do these words come from ? We don’t know where we will end up when we start. “It” speaks and we have to take responsibility for what it says, which means letting “it” add to the pile.
Related to the OP and my gratitude for your kind response:
Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the ‘one’ in relation to the ‘other’. I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.
Just discovered this thinker, but his concrete sense of the speech act very much matters for your OP, as I see it. The presupposed goal for some seems to be a speech by No One that is for Everyone.
How do we ascertain the nature of ‘reality itself’ so as to determine whether logic is part of it, or not part of it? Consider that many of the foundational works of philosophy, Aristotle’s included are precisely attempts to ground logic in the nature of reality. But then, this seems to come up against related questions of the nature of meaning, how language gets its purchase, whether sensory perception is veridical — many large philosophical questions are thrown up by this question.
I resist the appeal of ‘contingency’, the idea that logical norms are simply conventions determined by consensus. I think the way I would see it is that logic imposes itself on us. We are obliged by it to assent to certain structures of thought, and not as a matter of choice. And I can’t see how logic can be ascribed to our physicality, as it must be inextricably dependent on the ability to speak and understand basic concepts. Those are ideas that we grasp ‘as surely as our hand grasps a pencil’, as Frege once said. They’re not constructed by us but recognised as such, and are not subject to our will. we cannot make them or wish them otherwise.
As for the relationship between the divine intellect and truths of reason, obviously a deep subject, and fundamental to the Western metaphysical tradition, stretching back to Pythagoras and Parmenides. Not that I will embark on a dissertation, other than to say that there’s a thread running throughout the Greek texts, which connects sagacity or wisdom with the ability to see what is truly so – the implication being that we, the hoi polloi, generally don’t, for the want of philosophy. A related theme is that the eidos, the idea, in Platonic phillosophy, is where thinking and being become one, in that to see what something truly is, is for the mind to be conformed to it. From there, the sense that the forms or principles of particular things are universal ideas in the divine intellect is not so remote as it nowadays would often be depicted.
I would think it amounts to more than that. More like my simplified summary of the enactivist model. But I get your point.
Yes, I imagine there are constraints on how we are able to apprehend and construct reality. I’m thinking along lines closer to Kant: that the structure of our cognitive apparatus necessarily conditions experience through certain forms or categories, time, space, etc.
I suppose I’m ultimately dubious, though agnostic about notions such as a divine intellect, which to me can sometimes seem like a concept straining to explain what may simply be beyond explanation. But I respect this perspective regardless as it belongs to a longstanding tradition with a significant literature and I’d want to know something of the best of this tradition.
Quick question, in idealism, if being is fundamentally mental or consciousness, what distinguishes consciousness from reason? Is reason merely an activity within consciousness, or is rational structure itself constitutive of reality? Does that make sense?
We fight over where logic comes from. But we already inside world. World shows up. We notice. Many logic, all make that happen. No logic, nothing shows up, no one there to notice.
Logic not come from mind. Mind must follow logic. Logic older than mind. Logic what makes anything show up at all. First, not eternal.
Semantics maps onto the world. Logic is semantics.
A true propostion maps directly onto some aspect of reality. Valid logic describes semantic relations between propositions. Conclusions map to the world because valid logic is truth preserving.
Here’s a fairly simple way of posing the logic/world problem: Is the law of non-contradiction (If A, then not ~A) obligatory for us as thinkers because we cannot not think this way, or because we cannot not see the world this way? In other words, is the non-contradiction meant to describe the laws of rationality, or how things behave in the world? – “If that’s a rock, it can’t also not be a rock.” (Obviously we’re ignoring nuances of ambiguity; assume ceteris paribus.)
What we want to say is, Well, both! or Badly formed question! or How could we tell? And all of those may be good responses, but what’s important in posing the question this way is to see that there is no obvious, correct way to understand what “A or ~A” refers to. Enter the idea of “propositional content” . . .
If we think of the world in terms of lawful processes, and of features of reality that maintain factual identity even when the human perceiving them changes their perspective on that reality, then it would seem that the aim of knowledge is to do justice to those realities by attempting to capture, mirror, approximate them. From this vantage, formal and mathematical logic in some sense capture the very language of the real. S is P reflects the fact that the world consists of relations between persisting identities.
But if we believe that the structure of reality ‘itself’ never sits still, that it consists of constantly changing relational configurations of sense that human beings contribute to, then it will appear that what formal
logic and mathematics is doing is not describing the world but throwing a garb of abstractions over its continually changing senses of meaning. That doesn’t make these formal approaches wrong , it makes them thin, impoverished ways of making sense of a changing world rather than direct windows into the foundations of reality.
Fortunately, formal logic isnt the only kind of logic we can use to make sense of a world in constant motion. For instance, rather than thinking of sense-making in terms of what is true or false, correct or erroneous, we can view it more fundamentally as the attempt to anticipate future events on the basis of expectations derived from the patterns we discern in prior ones.
We are goal-oriented creatures, and what makes sense is defined by its relevance to our current purposes.
At minimum I would say that logic reveals something about the structure of human beings themselves, and is not merely a human tool. This is because illogical statements always come home to roost soon or later. It is a kind of law of nature. An illogical position cannot be societally sustained on the basis of tool-based justifications. Humans are naturally averse to illogical positions.
If you read someone like Aristotle you will find that he rejects the notion that first principles are known in the same way that conclusions are known. In the Metaphysics he says explicitly that there is no proof for the law of non-contradiction.
Notice the impicit distinctions being made between ‘being’, ‘reason’, and ‘reality itself’. I think that reflects an underlying sense of the subject-object division. We picture ourselves as the subject in a domain of objects and other beings. This situates reason ‘in here’, in the mental domain which is ostensibly ‘subjective’ or ‘in the mind’, distinguished from the objective, external domain, ‘the world’. The difficult point about that is that this division itself is the fundamental construct (in Schopenhauer’s sense of ‘vorstellung’.) The self-world or self-other distinction underlies every conscious act.
But then, logical laws are also said to be the ‘laws of thought’. So the question presents itself where are these laws? In what medium do they inhere? They don’t seem to be ‘out there somewhere’ in the so-called ‘objective world’. They must be ‘in here’, internal to thought. And if existence is divided this way, into the subjective and objective realm (and we tend to think this is pretty well exhaustive) they’re the only two options. And here again we notice the echo of the Cartesian division.
But maybe these principles are actually constitutive of the structure within which the subject-object distinction is made in the first place. And that is, within the structure of consciousness itself. The difficuly being, again, that this is not something we can get outside of, or properly objectify. And this is what I think transcendental idealism recognised; that they transcend the subject-object division which thought tends to fall into.
Of course there are philosophers who do not believe in mapping at all - In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty famously argues that philosophy should abandon the “mirror of nature” view that propositions and knowledge represent reality objectively.
This seems like an important formulation. I want to be sure I understand it.
“Principles” here refers to the laws of thought, or logical laws, yes?
So you’re saying that logical laws constitute the structure within which the subject/object distinction is first made. And finally, that another name for this structure which is constituted by logical laws is “consciousness itself.”
Have I got that right?
(Preview of my next question: “Constitutive” is doing a lot of work here; in what sense can logical principles constitute something?)
Can you provide a juicy example so I can see this in action?
Subject–object distinction seems to be a fundamental organising principle, and I’d be interested in a sketch of how this could be overcome. I assume you’d point to practices aimed at exploring higher consciousness rather than philosophy itself?
Yes, that is interesting. If the law of non-contradiction does not hold in every case, as some thinkers maintain, then what does this mean for a “law” of logic? It seems to me this suggests that such laws may themselves be contingent at some level. Or perhaps logic can be understood in a more dynamic and less ossified way, which seems somewhat antithetical to such principles. This is a subject that requires an expertise I do not have.
I’m assuming you don’t think that the traditional emphasis on formal logic is still adequate for contemporary philosophical and practical needs. Are we currently in a transition period?
But let’s even say it did hold in every case. (Again, you have to exclude fuzzy formulations and assume we’re discussing statements, or phenomena, that have clear yes/no alternatives.) The question is, In what kind of domain are these cases to be found? What does the term “A” in “Either A or ~A” refer to? Is A a piece of language? A state of affairs in the world? Or something called “propositional content”? Maybe all of the above? To repeat my earlier point: We don’t have a ready-made, obvious answer to the question of what “Either A or ~A” is meant to refer to. That’s why the “Is it thought or is it the world?” conundrum can continue to puzzle us, I’d say.