Logic's Naturalistic Character.

For most of its long history, concepts of logical interest were defined over, and instantiated by, constructions of natural language. This is one of the things I have in mind when I speak of logic’s naturalistic character. For the most part, the tripartite distinction between a proposition S’s having a proposition S 0 as a consequence, someone spotting S 0 as a consequence of S 0, and someone drawing that consequence S 0 from that proposition S, had a recognizable, if unannounced, presence in logical theory. A full-service logic of the consequence relation makes theoretical provision for each of the three ways in which it manifests itself. Given that agents are needed for spotting and drawing, decisions must be taken as to the best way of bringing cognitive agency into logical theory. With spotting and drawing, epistemology becomes ineradicably linked to a full-service logic of consequence. Until approximately 170 years ago, logic’s agents were people, that is, beings like us, natural objects of the natural world. This is another of the things I have in mind in speaking of logic’s naturalistic character. The spotting and drawing domains started to change when Pascal’s axioms were adopted as rules of probabilistic inference and human agents were replaced by the mathematical fiction of ideally rational ones. Leibniz had a similar idea for all exact thought. In due course, deductive logic would also take the mathematicizing turn, thereby alienating human beings from the dynamics of spotting and drawing consequences. In the 1970s there arose a pushback that has yet to abate. It opened the road for the restoration of humans as they actually are in real life to the logics that are said to regulate their thinking.

Authors

• John Woods

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.