Jacob McNulty has an article at IAI arguing that the foundations of logic can only be found in metaphysics. (Warning: possible paywall. Alternate link.). He describes a problem called “the logocentric predicament,” that any attempt to justify logic with logic ends up being circular, risking an infinite regress. He notes that the most common response to this historically has been complacency, with Aristotle trying to just dismiss anyone questioning the law of noncontradiction. However subsequent developments in alternate forms of logic apparently make this a difficult stance.
McNulty ends up going through the views of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The discussion gets thick with the terminology of continental philosophy. As a result I struggle to understand exactly what he’s selling. But the overall point is that logic can only be justified with metaphysics, by which he means the “ambitious area of philosophy which strives to know God, the soul, the world.”
I actually don’t think this is true, at least not in the sense of requiring pure metaphysics. But it requires doing something logicians may resist, bringing in empirical information. Part of my willingness to do this comes from a comment logician Graham Priest made several years ago in an interview. He was arguing for alternate systems of logic, which he saw as justified because these systems can be seen as basically very basic theories of reality. And reality being complex, can often be viewed and understood through the lens of multiple theories.
One view, which McNulty mentions as problematic, is psychologism, the idea that logic is based on how we think. He argues that the view, “elides the distinction between how people ought to think and how people in fact do.” But this assumes that common thinking isn’t logical. It may not be at one level, the level of social interactions and decision making. But even a computer system, an inherently logical system, will produce results that seem illogical if it has bad or incomplete data, or isn’t working properly. Once we take into account bad or incomplete beliefs, along with various physiological impediments, it’s not hard to see why people often seem illogical too.
Interestingly enough, in the philosophy of logic, psychologism is often regarded as an anti-real stance, as opposed to the realism, which sees logic as existing independent of our minds. But the anti-real view of psychologism, I think, suffers from not continuing the chain of reasoning. Thinking, like digestion, at its most basic level isn’t learned. We just do it innately. Why do we think the way we do? Because it works, providing a survival advantage, which of course is why it evolved. Which means that it has a relation to the environment.
And the stance of psychologism being anti-real likely predates an example we have today, logic machines, like the one you’re using to read this. People argue about whether the mind is physical, but I’ve encountered few people asserting the operations of my phone or laptop aren’t. David Chalmers in his book Reality+ describes computers as causation machines. But I just described them as logic machines. Which is it? My take is that they’re one and the same, which I think gives us a clue to what logic is.
I’ve often referred to computation as distilled causation. Along those lines, I think logic is abstracted causation, or perhaps more fundamentally, abstracted structures and relations that exist in nature.
Of course, a platonist might argue that logic, math, and other abstractions are the more primal reality. But abstract objects in contemporary platonism (as opposed to Plato’s original forms metaphysics) are acausal with no temporospatial extent. If they exist, it’s a different type of “existence” than the patterns in our minds and environment, and don’t seem able to have any effects on those patterns. It’s a view that seems very vulnerable to Occam’s razor.
So logic is based on how we think, and our thinking evolved to resonate with common and repeatable patterns in nature. Logic, in all its various forms, captures these resonances, allowing us to optimize them, bottle them, and put them in our tools, with increasing effectiveness.
Unless of course I’m missing something. Are there problems with my view of logic? Or alternatives that work better? Or is McNulty right that we have to get into the “ambitious area of philosophy which strives to know God, the soul, the world,” to figure this out?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Aw, c’mon . . . metaphysics? Idiots keep trying to sell us on the answers being there, but there is no “there” there, except maybe Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and God, of course.
The foundation of logic is it was constructed to work (nice graphic, btw) and it does. Test it and it works. No matter the source, if we tested it and it didn’t work, would it still exist?
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(Have to credit some Wikipedia authors for the graphic.)
There are propositions which are untestable, including some predictions of otherwise well tested scientific theories. But in general I’m onboard. Of course, for some people, that means we’ve fallen into scientism.
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I guess I have to change my business cards to identify myself as a Scientismist instead of a Scientist.
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Well, I lost my rather long comment. Essentially I was saying that it sounds like you endorse psychologism (I’m assuming that’s what you meant, not “psychologicism”). But I think that view entails not only logical anti-realism, but scientific anti-realism as well, which would seem to undercut psychologism. In other words, if you reduce logic to human thought on naturalistic grounds, you have no basis for assuming our scientific laws apply to nature, no grounds for saying that “our thinking evolved to resonate with common and repeatable patterns in nature” is anything more than the way we think.
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Sorry your comment disappeared. And thanks for pointing out the spelling mistake. I went ahead and fixed it in the post. (And of course spell check is just wrong, which is what got me in trouble when composing.)
I only endorse psychologism as a reasoning step, not a final destination. Maybe I should have been more explicit about that in the post. For me the important question is, why does the mind work like that? Which is why I discussed evolution, causation, and the underlying structures and relations in the world.
So I consider myself a logical realist, but not a platonist. Or maybe semi-realist would be the right label. Like mathematics, I think logic is grounded in actual patterns in the world, although not all of the extrapolations will match actual patterns out there. I haven’t found an existing category that seems to match this view.
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“Or maybe semi-realist would be the right label. Like mathematics, I think logic is grounded in actual patterns in the world, although not all of the extrapolations will match actual patterns out there.”
Maybe you’re not an ontic structural realist, then, but an epistemic structural realist? I take epistemic structural realists to say that reality is partly knowable, but only by its structure (what it is in itself is unknown). I don’t think that would necessarily mean the structure of reality is completely knowable, only that reality is knowable in that way. Does that sound right? Or maybe there’s some other reason you wouldn’t want to call yourself an ESRist?
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Just to clarify, my view has the extra “stuff” on the logic / math side, not the reality one. So I think logic and math are fully structure and relations. It’s just that not all of those structures and relations are actual patterns in the world. (Such as the Mandelbrot set, to use a frequent example on the math side.)
I actually thought I was an ESRist when I first read about structural realism. We can’t say anything about intrinsic properties, “things in themselves,” including whether they exist or not. The OSR stance seemed a bit too presumptive.
But that was before I realized how freely ESRists speculate about those “things in themselves,” ignoring the fact that they are utterly and forever unknowable. (The only way for us to ever know anything about them is for them to turn out to be relational after all.) Ultimately I decided the concept of “things in themselves” does no useful work, yet is subject to abuse.
But I could change my mind if anyone could convince me that intrinsic properties is a useful concept.
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“But that was before I realized how freely ESRists speculate about those “things in themselves,” ignoring the fact that they are utterly and forever unknowable.”
Haha…yeah, I dislike it when—ahem—certain philosophers talk about “Kantian humility”. As if!
I’m not sure what ESR’s explicit views are on ‘things in themselves’ or whether they are knowable. Chalmers says no, they aren’t knowable, but then he and his friends seem to take this supposedly unknowable fundamental stuff as an opportunity to speculate wildly, though I’m not sure if this metaphysical free-for-all was intended from the beginning. Anyway, I’m just not clear on how ESR takes things in themselves. Most non-academic philosophers who like the view and ascribe to it implicitly or explicitly probably haven’t read Kant. If ESR takes things in themselves to be unknowable, they probably have no idea what this entails. In other words, most are just scientific realists who don’t understand the epistemic implications of the view.
Contra Chalmers, I would argue ESR just isn’t Kantian in any important way. There are too many systematic differences to make that comparison.
ESR is actually much closer to traditional realism in many crucial ways, although I suspect proponents of ESR have different views on this. One thing that seems to be constant: ESR takes for granted that causal relations come from the world and exist in nature. Those who believe in ESR don’t take up Kant’s view of causality. They don’t think of causality as the way we structure experience, but view it as derived from or inhering in relations in the world itself. I suspect PF Strawson’s book on Kant had a big influence here. I gather he used a transcendental argument to out-Kant Kant on noumena, but I haven’t read the full book yet.
This actually ties into the meaningful difference for you, I think, between ESR and OSR. I could be wrong, but it seems to me ESR replaces matter (which no longer matters, at least not as a fundamental foundation for physicality) with a hypothetical unknown and unknowable entity. In other words, there’s a placeholder stuff where matter used to be, and this placeholder preserves the reductive-mechanistic causal structure of materialism. After all, if nature is nothing but relations all the way down, as OSR says, then there’s no reason to say the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. You’d just say, “What parts?” So going by what you’ve said before, that you believe in mechanistic reduction, I think ESR makes more sense. And no need to speculate on what that ultimate stuff is, although I’m surprised you’re not tempted to join the party. 🙂
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The thing about ESR is, I’m not even sure the idea of ultimately intrinsic properties is coherent. What does it mean to say that “things in themselves” exist in some manner that has no relations to the structure and relations we can interact (have relations) with? I can’t see a prospective mechanism there.
So my take with the mechanistic perspective is that “things in themselves” isn’t a promising concept. Rather, it strikes me as an attempt to project our pre-scientific intuitions underneath the underlying mechanisms physics has uncovered.
I think the reason I’m reluctant to join the “ultimate stuff” party is that I’m too aware of the history of that endeavor, starting with Thales deciding that the ultimate stuff was water. I have a sneaking suspicion that any speculation in this area will look quaint to any future archaeologists who manage to uncover our discussions.
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Keep in mind, Kant wouldn’t say that things in themselves are acausal either. Only that we can’t know things in themselves, not even whether they are causally efficacious or not. Things in themselves are simply mind independent objects, which is why we can’t know them according to Kant.
Now this is just Kant‘s point of view. Other philosophers may think that we can know things in themselves or that we can know whether things in themselves are causally efficacious. Most of our contemporary philosophers think that things in themselves are causally efficacious; in other words, things in themselves cause our representations of them, even if we can’t know their intrinsic natures. Their idea of things in themselves (which I called a placeholder for matter) would have some fundamental entity belonging to a deterministic world in which the ordinary rules of reductive causality apply, at least this is usually the case, although I wouldn’t assume anything without verifying.
Also, the word intrinsic doesn’t necessarily mean things in themselves, and it doesn’t necessarily mean acausal either. After all, mass is an intrinsic property, but we wouldn’t say that it’s acausal.
The point is, what makes a view epiphenomenal has to do with their particular beliefs and the overall structure of the particular philosophical view. If they talk about intrinsic properties or intrinsic natures or things in themselves, nothing about causality can be assumed from these words alone, not until it’s made clear what they mean in relation to their overall view. So they may talk about things in themselves, but they might not mean this term in the same way that Kant meant it. This is why I think it’s strange that they liken their views to Kant, because I know their views aren’t really Kantian and they’re only being confusing. What they should be doing is distinguishing themselves from Kant.
Whether things in themselves (mind independent objects) are knowable or only partially knowable or causal or acausal is up to you to decide for yourself.
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I think last time we discussed this, we established that by “mind independent objects” you mean objects with no causal or other relations to a mind. (Let me know if I have that wrong.) By that standard, I would say they have to be either acausal or in a completely separate causal framework we have no access to, which to me makes them forever unknowable (at least causally and/or physically).
But if by “mind independent object” we just mean the object can exist before, between, and after anyone perceives it in their mind, that it is something we can interact with, even if only indirectly, then I would think it would be knowable.
I haven’t read Kant, so I don’t know which of these he meant, or if he meant something else. Based on the SEP, it sounds like there are many interpretations. (And based on the quotes used, his language seems maddeningly opaque, at least to the uninitiated.)
I think physicists use the word “intrinsic” in a different fashion than philosophers. In physics it’s a much less absolute term, used at a certain level of analysis, but not for all levels. For example, mass is intrinsic for most particle physics purposes, until we start talking about the Higgs boson and field, when mass seems to become relational. And of course mass is always causal on larger general relativity scales.
It’s similar to the difference between how engineers use “epiphenomenal” from philosophers. In an engineering sense, the steam coming out of a steam engine is epiphenomenal, meaning it itself serves no designed purpose once released, but not in the philosophical sense of having no causal effects at all.
In any case, if someone uses the less absolute sense of “intrinsic”, then it seems like they’re opening the door to it being knowable, in the same way mass is.
Right, it seems clear that the terms “Kantian” and “neo-Kantian” are pretty amorphous. For example, people sometimes say Niels Bohr was a Kantian or neo-Kantian, but it’s not clear what they mean by it. It’s usually just thrown out to swat aside the idea that he was an instrumentalist. (Bohr was another pretty opaque writer.)
My take is that the non-relational “things in themselves”, if it’s a coherent concept (I have my doubts), would be unknowable. I think the relational version is knowable, at least in principle.
Unless I’m wrong. 😀
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Sorry about all the confusion. I think I need to do a better job of separating my own views from others.
“I think last time we discussed this, we established that by “mind independent objects” you mean objects with no causal or other relations to a mind. (Let me know if I have that wrong.)”
Mind-independent objects simply are things in themselves. But the meaning of mind-independent objects (and things in themselves) is not definitionally tied up to any particular stance on their causal nature. So they’re not necessarily causal or acausal or anything like that, not by definition anyway.
—ME: I think mind-independent objects can’t be known because to say we know mind-independent objects makes no sense. How can we know something independently of our minds? I don’t think we even need to have faith in their existence. So whether they can cause anything or not is for me obviously irrelevant.
—KANT: Kant would agree with me that mind-independent objects can’t be known. Kant goes on to say we must believe as a matter of faith in the bare existence mind-independent objects. He would say we can’t know anything about them. We can’t know whether they cause anything. But it’s not that things in themselves don’t cause anything; it’s just that we can’t know.
This is indeed my interpretation of Kant, but I think it’s justified by the text and fairly standard. Some people interpret Kant differently since, as you pointed out, he’s quite opaque. I think he found it hard to be consistent, which is understandable.
—NAIVE REALISTS: Most people—the vast majority of ordinary non-philosophical people—believe we can know mind-independent objects directly. Even to say we only know their structure would be perplexing to them. (I think this reveals there’s something to the notion of mind-independent objects, even if the whole concept is unintelligible. There’s something revealed here in our intuitions about objects, and this is what I think idealism can illuminate.)
—MANY SCIENTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS: We can know mind-independent objects, but only indirectly. Those mind-independent object or “things in themselves” are usually taken to be the cause of our experiences (which they might call representations or impressions or something like that). These mind-independent objects are also assumed to belong to the world and therefore they causally affect other things.
I don’t think this view is coherent, but that’s just me. I think when people talk about things in themselves and mind-independence, they’re often deeply confused and unclear about how we can know things outside our minds.
“But if by “mind independent object” we just mean the object can exist before, between, and after anyone perceives it in their mind, that it is something we can interact with, even if only indirectly, then I would think it would be knowable.”
What you’re expressing here is what many believe, but I don’t think this captures a different meaning of the term “mind-independent”. “…we just mean the object can exist before, between, and after anyone perceives it in their mind”—that’s what I mean by the term “mind-independent” too. Something that exists independently of anyone perceiving it.
But I think “that it is something we can interact with, even if only indirectly,” is unintelligible. What’s going on here isn’t, I don’t think, a matter of having different definitions of “mind-independence”. It’s a matter of having different views. I think it’s unintelligible to say we can know mind independent objects at all, even indirectly. If anyone knows a mind-independent object at all, even indirectly, then the mind independent object is not truly a mind-independent object anymore. To claim to know a mind-independent object even indirectly is an epistemic overreach.
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Thanks for trying to clarify things. Unfortunately I fear it just muddled the waters for me.
Maybe some examples might help. Is my TV independent of my mind? What about the coronavirus? Or tectonic plates?
I have much more primal access to the TV; I can touch it, manipulate it, watch it, etc. But like most people, I’m dependent on hearsay for the other two. Yet we seem to need the concept of the virus to explain observed phenomena (people getting sick). And we seem to need tectonic plates to explain and predict other observed phenomena (earthquakes in particular locations). Does it make sense to say TV, viruses, and tectonic plates are knowable? If these aren’t good examples of mind independent things, what would be?
Or are we talking about some essence of TVs, viruses, and tectonic plates, and that’s what is mind independent / things in themselves?
I wonder if the difference in view might come down to what we mean by “know”. To me, knowledge means having an ability to predict. If we can do that, then I think we know at least some things about whatever it is we’re talking about. I can see someone arguing for a more demanding conception of “know”, one that only pertains to things we directly perceive in our consciousness.
Of course, this gets into what we think direct perceptions are. I think predictive processing theories have a lot going for them. If they’re true, then perception is prediction, and we’re back to the definition above. But if someone thinks perceptions are something categorically different, then I can see that driving a distinction.
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“Is my TV independent of my mind? What about the coronavirus? Or tectonic plates?”
Sure! I’m not saying reality is constituted by YOUR mind, as that would be solipsism. Mind-independence means independent of all minds. Not just my mind or your mind.
“Does it make sense to say TV, viruses, and tectonic plates are knowable?”
Sure! Just because something isn’t visible doesn’t mean it’s unknowable. Theories are knowable. 2+2 is knowable. Fictional characters are knowable. The main point is, all of these things are known by minds.
“If these aren’t good examples of mind independent things, what would be?”
I can’t give you an example of mind-independence because that would mean I’d have to know of something I can’t know about.
“I wonder if the difference in view might come down to what we mean by “know”.
Maybe we’d have different theories of knowledge in the grand scheme of things, but I’m not sure that difference makes a difference here. I doubt we’d disagree on “knowing of”. For instance, I might know of someone without having met the person. If you admit that “to be acquainted with” in this way is a type of knowledge, even if minimal, then I don’t think we’ll necessarily end up talking past one another.
“To me, knowledge means having an ability to predict. If we can do that, then I think we know at least some things about whatever it is we’re talking about.”
Can prediction take place outside of all minds? If so, does it really count as prediction?
Maybe another way of putting it is, there’s nothing we can talk about that’s mind-independent. Talking about it means it’s in our minds, after all.
Anything we can talk about exists in some way or another and is not, cannot be, mind-independent. We’re talking about it! It’s in our minds! That’s not to say talking about something makes it real. Only that if we’re talking about it, it’s not mind-independent.
I hope that helps and doesn’t confuse you further!
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“Mind-independence means independent of all minds.”
Ah, ok, thanks. This clears up a lot. Berkeley idealism really leaves nothing mind independent, so under that view, nothing is. Although I wonder if it’s what Kant meant.
“Can prediction take place outside of all minds? If so, does it really count as prediction?”
Computer systems can make predictions, and many are programmed to take action without human involvement. For example, stock systems which are programmed to buy or sell under projected conditions. And hurricane models predict the path and timing of particular storms. Autocomplete attempts to predict what I’m going to type, and despite my frustration with it, gets it right much of the time. We can quibble about whether that’s “real” prediction, but the result seems the same.
It seems pretty clear neither of us is a Kantian, although for different reasons. You’re skeptical of any mind independent reality. I’m skeptical of the “things in themselves” concept, at least in the sense of something unknowable. (I’m open to the possibility that there may be aspects of reality unknowable, but I don’t think Kant’s concepts have anything to do with those possibilities.)
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It seems to me that your answer isn’t really justifying logic, but going with the circular approach. I suppose the only way to escape that is a non logical means of justification, and I guess McNulty’s suggestion sounded fairly non logical?
This discussion reminded me of something said in a post on Footnotes2Plato (https://wp.me/pVlGz-39o) – “Whitehead, especially in his last book Modes of Thought (1938), notes the implications of Gödel’s work and suggests that we must now understand logic as a subset of aesthetics. Our sense of logical truths and our ability to make logical judgments, he argues, are rooted in deeper intuitions of harmony and balance.” I wish I knew more, but this line of reasoning seems more promising (at a glance) than trying to justify logic through Hegelian metaphysics.
If Whitehead is right about that, I suppose it might give hope to those trying to build reasoning AIs out of our current AIs, which seem to have intuition more or less down.
It’s also similar to Bergson’s thought that intellect is “cut out” of intuition, which is “mind itself” (Creative Evolution, ch3).
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I was actually thinking, perhaps naively, that resorting to empirical observation would break out of the circularity. But admittedly we don’t truly understand something until we can provide an a priori accounting of our empirical observations. And that does involve logic. But as someone on Bluesky noted to me, maybe that’s not a bad kind of circularity.
I struggled to follow McNulty’s approach, but I can verify that Hegelian metaphysics was the focus, with discussion of Being, although he admitted it was a somewhat unusual interpretation of Hegel. (The link will probably work for a while, if you’re interested.)
Logic as a subset of aesthetics sounds like a strange idea to me, like maybe something too subjective. But I can’t say I know much about the philosophy of aesthetics, so I may be demonstrating my ignorance.
I think of intuition as a conclusion we reach without having access to the steps that got us there, basically unconscious reasoning. Which makes me think Whitehead and Bergson may be using a different conception.
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Yeah I agree that it’s maybe not a bad circularity. If there’s nothing beyond logic that might justify it, a circle would tell us that at least it’s self consistent.
I did read the link, but it’s still pretty opaque to me sadly. I think that’s just me not being familiar enough with Hegel.
Would you consider LLMs as possessing intuition? They reach conclusions without understanding the steps that got them there (especially models without CoT), but I wouldn’t call it unconscious reasoning. I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s more like reasoning is intuitions brought to consciousness.
For Bergson, intuition is the more natural and more fundamental mode of thinking and living, that’s more dynamic and difficult to express in words. It deals with the world as something that’s in constant flux. Whereas what he calls “intellect” is the mind that insists on treating everything as static, so it reduces time to a series of timeless frames, and sees everything through a lens of something like geometry.
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I’m glad someone besides me found that article opaque.
It seems like for intuition, the conclusion needs to be conscious, but not the steps to reach it. It’s the appearance of the conclusion without any apparent steps that, I think, give us the concept of intuition, at least as I understand it. So I wouldn’t see LLMs as possessing intuition.
I think I agree with Bergson that the reasoning we are aware of is always composed of intuitions, Put another way, what we call “intuitions” seem to exist at the boundary of what introspection can access.
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I’m enjoying a sunny vacation and not paying close attention, but it occurs to me that this is about whether logic precedes causality, or causality precedes logic. When one billiard ball hits another, is what happens imposed on the billiard balls by what amounts to a transcendent logic built into reality, or does what the billiard balls actually do create what we come to understand as the logic of their actions?
From yesterday’s brief read, I had the vague impression you’d like to go with the latter interpretation. Yet I don’t think you’re suggesting the billiard balls are making some kind of choice, and providing a foothold for logic only because of their amazing consistency. Why do they do what they do? An unseen logic that drives causality, or some sort of agency with its own logic, which appears as causality? Or is there another option?
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A sunny vacation sounds like a fabulous idea right now. Wish that’s where I was.
I think logic is patterns in agents that are abstractions of the structures and relations in spacetime. So in my view, those patterns drive logic, not the other way around.
I’m hedging on your causality question because causality seems to be a macroscopic phenomenon emergent from the second law of thermodynamics. We could talk about symmetric interactions at a more fundamental level, but those seem like relations across time. So the relations seem like the main thing.
Of course, this is based on the idea that agents are systems that are completely in the causal framework of this universe. If that should ever turn out not to be true, than my line of reasoning might be different.
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I’ll comment first, then read McNulty’s article, then comment again if needed. I think the problem(?) of “what justifies logic?” is so hard, it’s simple. That is, it leaves so few options that a lot of progress on the question comes immediately. To wit:
Clearly, any justification of a logical system will have to involve logic. We observe or calculate something, e.g. we use truth tables to prove that our logic never yields a false conclusion from true premises. And then we say “therefore, this logic is justified” – which is a logical inference.
Is that problematically circular? Well, why even worry about what justifies logic? The idea must be that if we use the “wrong” logic, we’ll get bad results, such as believing falsehoods, or refusing to believe truths (and then presumably also refusing to take actions that we would take if we knew these truths). But in that case, we have additional criteria beyond logic and more logic – we can check for whether a proposed logic leads to these bad results. Yes, we have to use some logic or other to do so, but by assumption, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the logic will validate itself (or that the logical systems we are entertaining will validate each other). The assumption being, to repeat, that we are worried our logic might be leading us astray, i.e. there is some possibility, as far as we know, that it is.
And that, in my opinion, makes it non-problematically recursive, rather than strictly circular.
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I’m onboard with most of this. I agree recursion is fine, as long as there’s a way to eventually break out of the recursion. I think bringing in the empirical observation on the effectiveness of logic accomplishes that.
So it’s not circularity in and of itself, but infinite circularity, the infinite regress, which is the issue. Although I think philosophers are often far too quick to claim infinite regress against a justification they dislike, and far too slow to scrutinize whether it really is such a regress.
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I feel this question is close to the one of whether logic can prove its own consistency, and to the best of my knowledge (which is not saying much), the answer is ‘yes’ for propositional logic, and ‘no’ for logics strong enough to be capable of Peano arithmetic. From some of the things I have read, accepting that the concept of the natural numbers is a consistent (coherent?) one, and (or?) that each of Peano’s axioms is a true statement about the natural numbers, is sufficient to ‘break out’ of the impasse with respect to arithmetic (i.e. prove its consistency), but that is not a conclusion we can reach empirically, no matter how obvious it seems (unless introspecting about what must be so is an empirical method, but, empirically, it has not been very reliable!)
If you have a consistent logic, then I think is is correct to say that the most it can tell you are some of the propositions that are consistent with your axioms. If you are using a consistent logic for which what you believe to be true is a model, then it would seem inconsistent not to believe any conclusions you arrive at. I feel this view is in agreement with the thesis of this article, and it is not obvious to me (for what that’s worth) that logic needs any further justification.
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Thanks for commenting!
You may be right. Someone mentioned Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to me and your remarks make me realize where they were coming from. But broadly I agree that we’re on the same page, although it sounds like you probably know a lot more about this than I do.
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I see every point in beginning with a deep philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. Exploring questions about existence, identity, causality, and the fundamental nature of things. Science does not delve this far.
I see every advantage to having logical laws derived from a deeper understanding of reality. Which science is only beginning to investigate. It is not enough to “measure” without understanding.
Equally, I can see the vital importance of adjusting and refining the metaphysical and logical principles we work on as new insights and understanding emerge.
To shut off “metaphysics” is to wear blinkers. Perhaps science might one day recognise this.
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I’m generally more science oriented, but I don’t think it’s an either / or thing. Both science and philosophy should proceed and take input from each other. That’s actually what happens anyway within science between the theoretical and experimental sub-fields.
In my view, we only start to have trouble when one side ignores the other. A broader scope of inquiry is always better, or at least allowing many narrow scopes to see what is discovered.
That said, when theory (metaphysical or otherwise) conflicts with observation, rigorous repeatable or other verifiable observation, I see theory as the side that needs to change.
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Certain agree with your conflict scenario. And with the rest of your comments. I do find myself somewhat surprised by the closed nature of some of the other people’s comments on this matter but then of course I must respect their views as honestly held. Of prime importance is open mindedness and tolerance for the views of others. The points you raise in your posts are valuable and challenging. The debate is an important one.
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I am also not sure, to be honest, that it’s pays to get stuck on other people’s definitions. Or definitions per se. It’s so very tedious. Hegal said this, Plato said that. So what?
Its not very original. Better to make ones own mind up.
Which is where I very much like and agree with your insistence on aligning ones philosophy with tested and proven “facts” as, when and if they emerge. From science. So much arguement ends up disappearing up its own orifice! But then so many people like to argue. Like to insist they are the Truth. They have seen the light.
Better perhaps to admit that few of us know very much. Well, that’s certainly how I feel.
But of course I may simply be the ignoramus in the woodpile
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Grateful for your kind words!
I’m what Jacy Reese Anthis calls a semanticist. I think what someone means when they use certain words shouldn’t be taken for granted. The trick is getting clarification, if possible. When that can’t happen, we risk talking and debating past each other with different meanings. My impression is some huge portion of philosophical debates and problems are more about definitions than anything else.
Definitely agree that we should be honest about what we know, or what is or isn’t known more generally, and how or why we think we think we know what we do. A lot of us debate scientific concepts, but I always try to be honest that I’m not a professional scientist and have to depend heavily on the expertise of others. And it is true that for many things, several answers remain possible, with only our Bayesian priors to lean on for which to prefer.
Although I also think we have to be on guard against holding on to mysteries just to avoid conclusions we dislike.
No ignoramuses here, but I sometimes wonder how quaint our shared assumptions might seem to a future archaeologist who manages to stumble on these discussions.
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Logic is making up your mind. Which, sounds too easy, but ‘changing your mind’ is too easy — logic is a tool for imposing structure, it’s housekeeping for your ideas, whether they are good ideas or not. Logic is therefore not about reality. In reality, things change, and that is not logical. Change breaks your logical deductions. First rule in logic is don’t change your mind. That doesn’t somehow make it impossible to change your mind. But when you do, it breaks your logic. Saying that logic isn’t about reality sure sounds like I’m trying to debunk logic, but within its realm of proper application, it’s great. That realm of proper application is in your head. You make something true in logic by saying that it’s true. Even if it’s false. The idea that two things are logically equivalent is a matter of actively ignoring the details that contradict the assertion that the two things are logically equivalent. When people say that some things are ‘the same’, it’s *never* actually true. It’s, instead, a choice of emphasis. There are different kinds of logic, but they’re all about being peremptory, per se. There are ‘richer’ kinds of logic, more expressive kinds of logic, and you can prove more with them, at the risk of confusing yourself. Logic is about making up your mind.
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Thanks for commenting. Your view sounds similar to the psychologicism discussed in the post.
One question I’d ask is, do you see the mind as something that exists in the physical universe? If not then your view that logic isn’t about reality makes sense. But if the mind is part of reality, and assuming it works the same way the rest of reality does, then wouldn’t that in turn make logic part of that reality?
If so, then the question might be, what parts of reality does it reflect? Which is what gets into the causation discussion I have in the post.
Of course, if you do see the mind as something that exists outside of reality, or works by radically different principles than the rest of reality, then this doesn’t necessarily apply. But my view is that the mind is part of reality and operates according to the laws of nature. At least today. 🙂
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