Logician

“ Nor are consciousness and linguistic analysis all the instruments of the logician. Logic has to consider the things we know, the minds by which we know them from sense, memory and experience to inference, and the sciences which systematize and extend our knowledge of things; and having considered these facts, the logician must make such a science of inference as will explain the power and the poverty of human knowledge. ”

“ But if once this subject is logically discussed, if once we go into it on the basis of a pure reasoning process, it is found really impossible to construct such a proof as shall satisfy every logician. As far as my knowledge extends, every logician is able to pick a hole in every other logician's proof. Now, here we have, then, a case obvious to you all, in which common-sense decides for us without any doubt or hesitation at all. ”

“ But to impose upon the facts in the first instance the yoke of a theory, while the grounds of the theory are reserved for discussion in a subsequent stage, is not a course which a logician can reasonably adopt. ”

“ When I mean to assert anything respecting the ideas, I give them their proper name, I call them ideas: as when I say, that a child's idea of a battle is unlike the reality, or that the ideas entertained of the Deity have a great effect on the characters of mankind.
The notion that what is of primary importance to the logician in a proposition, is the relation between the two ideas corresponding to the subject and predicate, (instead of the relation between the two phenomena which they respectively express,) seems to me one of the most fatal errors ever introduced into the philosophy of Logic ”

“ But how little does the psychologist know about the association of ideas, compared with what the logician has discovered about the processes of inference! The fact is that our primary consciousness of all mental operations is hardly equal to our secondary consciousness of the processes of the one operation of inference from premises to conclusions permeating long trains and pervading whole sciences. This elaborate consciousness of inferential process is the justification of logic as a distinct science, and is the first step in its method. ”

“ Seeing, then, that there is much less difference between hypothetical propositions and any others, than one might be led to imagine from their form, we should be at a loss to account for the conspicuous position which they have been selected to fill in treatises on Logic, if we did not remember that what they predicate of a proposition, namely, its being an inference from something else, is precisely that one of its attributes with which most of all a logician is concerned. ”

“ Can the analytic logician prevent all osmosis between his logic and his psychology?22 If not, and if the psychological act is subjective, woe then to his logic. Had the new logic begun with a bold challenge of the psychical character of the act of knowing, the prospect of a logic free from epistemology would have been much brighter. ”

“ Finally; the Logician, intent upon perfecting the certitudes of his methods rather than upon expressing the confusing subtleties of truth, has done little to help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that arises from the fact that the universe can be seen in many different fashions and expressed by many different systems of terms, each expression within its limits true and yet incommensurable with expression upon a differing system. There is a sort of stratification in human ideas. ”

“ Even in ordinary conversation, the ideas connected with the word Logic include at least precision of language, and accuracy of classification: and we perhaps oftener hear persons speak of a logical arrangement, or of expressions logically defined, than of conclusions logically deduced from premises. Again, a man is often called a great logician, or a man of powerful logic, not for the accuracy of his deductions, but for the extent of his command over premises ”

“ Theoretically we can assume an implication between any elements of an object, but in this abstract assumption the symbolic logician overlooks the fact that he is also assuming some content which is not analyzed and which is the ground of the implication. In other words this logician confuses the scientific attitude of being ready to question anything with an attitude of being willing to question everything at once. ”

“ Every step can be measured by an axiom—every result can be traced to a first principle.* To detect error, then, in any province of investigation, or any domain of argument, the logician first looks to the primary principles on which it is based, and thus tests the legitimacy of its conclusions. ”

“ Logicians cannot make the meaning of any but scientific terms: that of all other words is made by the collective human race. But logicians can ascertain clearly what it is which, working obscurely, has guided the general mind to a particular employment of a name; and when they have found this, they can clothe it in such distinct and permanent terms, that mankind shall see the meaning which before they only felt, and shall not suffer it to be afterwards forgotten or misapprehended. ”

“ If the whole world of things is mind, operations and processes of mind have only to recognize their like all the world over. It is clear then that a man’s metaphysics and psychology must colour his logic. It is accordingly necessary to the logician to know beforehand the general distinctions and principles of things in metaphysics, and the mental operations of sense, conception, memory and experience in psychology, so as to discover the processes of inference from experience about things in logic. ”

“ But Reasoning, even in the widest sense of which the word is susceptible, does not seem to comprehend all that is included, either in the best, or even in the most current, conception of the scope and province of our science. The employment of the word Logic to denote the theory of argumentation, is derived from the Aristotelian, or, as they are commonly termed, the scholastic, logicians. ”

“ The nobody is a conjunctive argument, and one that consists of the indefinite and the definite, and which has a minor premiss and a conclusion; as, for instance, “If any one is here, he is not in Rhodes.”
L. Such then are the doctrines which the Stoics maintain on the subject of logic, in order as far as possible to establish their point that the logician is the only wise man. ”

“ Logic, according to this new school, which has by our time become an old school, has to co-ordinate these three operations, direct them, and, beginning with conceptions, combine conceptions into judgments, and judgments into inference, which thus becomes a complex combination of conceptions, or, in modern parlance, an extension of our ideas. Conceptual logicians were, indeed, from the first aware that sense supplies the data, and that judgment and therefore inference contains belief that things are or are not. ”

“ No wonder that those who knew by practical experience how truths are come at, should deem a science futile, which consisted chiefly of such speculations. What has been done for the advancement of Logic since these doctrines came into vogue, has been done not by professed logicians, but by discoverers in the other sciences ”

“ We may say then that what logicians had been seeking, though without quite knowing what they sought, was a Logic made wide and vigorous by using all attainable knowledge of the Laws of Thought as freely as, in working sums, we use our knowledge of the Laws of Number. ”

“ But science aims at unifying knowledge; and after reducing all possible arguments that form categorical syllogisms to the nineteen Moods, it is another step in the same direction to reduce these Moods to one form. This is the very nature of science: and, accordingly, the efforts of some Logicians to expound separate principles of each Figure seem to be supererogatory. Grant that they succeed; and what can the next step be, but either to reduce these principles to the Dictum, or the Dictum and the rest to one of these principles? Unless this can be done there is no science of Formal Logic. ”

“ To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers. ”

“ This very law which the logicians would impose upon us—if I may give the name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature here—is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use. ”

“ therefore, if a man can play the true logician, to have as well judgment as invention, he may do great matters, especially if the times be fit. ”

“ When a general name stands for each and every individual which it is a name of, or in other words, which it denotes, it is said by logicians to be distributed, or taken distributively. Thus, in the proposition, All men are mortal, the subject, Man, is distributed, because mortality is affirmed of each and every man. ”

“ The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide to it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from their science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations. ”

“ But if they have entered into the spirit of these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression on them to become rooted and established in their minds, they will feel how much difference there is between what is said here and what a few logicians may perhaps have written by chance approximating to it in a few passages of their works. ”

“ In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, philosophers looking about for something to supply its place, laid their hands upon the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in which class its grammatical form would seem to place it: but being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in their terminology, it has ever since been used as a concrete name. ”

“ For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g. by Meinong, [40] that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. ”

“ The function of logic in philosophy, as I shall try to show at a later stage, is all-important; but I do not think its function is that which it has in the classical tradition. In that tradition, logic becomes constructive through negation. Where a number of alternatives seem, at first sight, to be equally possible, logic is made to condemn all of them except one, and that one is then pronounced to be realised in the actual world. Thus the world is constructed by means of logic, with little or no appeal to concrete experience. ”

“ It is therefore necessary, in analysing a belief, to look for some other logical form than a two-term relation. Failure to realise this necessity has, in my opinion, vitiated almost everything that has hitherto been written on the theory of knowledge, making the problem of error insoluble and the difference between belief and perception inexplicable.
Modern logic, as I hope is now evident, has the effect of enlarging our abstract imagination, and providing an infinite number of possible hypotheses to be applied in the analysis of any complex fact. ”

“ Logic, as I conceive it, is the entire theory of the ascertainment of reasoned or inferred truth. Formal Logic, therefore, which Sir William Hamilton from his own point of view, and Archbishop Whately from his, have represented as the whole of Logic properly so called, is really a very subordinate part of it, not being directly concerned with the process of Reasoning or Inference in the sense in which that process is a part of the Investigation of Truth. ”

“ Whether God and duty are realities, the existence of which is manifest to us a priori by the constitution of our rational faculty; or whether our ideas of them are acquired notions, the origin of which we are able to trace and explain; and the reality of the objects themselves a question not of consciousness or intuition, but of evidence and reasoning.
The province of logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. ”

“ That all contradiction in concepts should be [Pg 33] forbidden, is the result of a belief, that we are able to form concepts, that a concept not only characterises but also holds the essence of a thing.... As a matter of fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only holds good of assumed existences which we have created. Logic is the attempt on our part to understand the actual world according to a scheme of Being devised by ourselves; or, more exactly, it is our attempt at making the actual world more calculable and more susceptible to formulation, for our own purposes.... ”

“ The treatises on Logic, and on the branches of Mental Philosophy connected with Logic, which have been produced since the intrusion of this cardinal error, though sometimes written by men of extraordinary abilities and attainments, almost always tacitly imply a theory that the investigation of truth consists in contemplating and handling our ideas, or conceptions of things, instead of the things themselves: a doctrine tantamount to the assertion, that the only mode of acquiring knowledge of nature is to study it at second hand, as represented in our own minds. ”