Logic and the World

Since returning to the States, I've looked over my blog site and discovered a draft that I never finished, began just over a year ago. It seemed like an interesting topic, so I decided to revive it.

I had a short conversation recently (that is, over a year ago) with some friends about logic and about where it is 'located', in the world, in our minds, or maybe just in the minds of a particular class of educated Western males. Now of course I was was the one to suggest the possibility of the later (not that I even hold it to be true, although some feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Nye, in fact, do) and was immediately harangued for it. It was as if calling someone illogical implied they were irrational!

Now logic, particularly symbolic logic, is a field that has been developed primarily by Western males. But it also claims a universal and atemporal status over everything that could be considered true.  The Logical Positivists even claimed that if you couldn't think about something in terms of logical formulae, you weren't actually thinking about anything at all.  Certainly if you hold to that view, being illogical is the same as being delusional.  When you get down to the bottom of it, is this the only way to think about reality?  And if so, why was it male Europeans who figured it out?

Speaking of language games, logic is perhaps most clearly a game. Points of discussion, ideas, people, places, and things all become "predicates" and then are placed within a well-defined grid. These playing pieces are then moved around much like a game of chess, with well-defined rules for what may or may not be done.  The problem I see with logic is this act of predication constitutes a break with reality, a reduction of something actual to a term usable by logic.  All context and history is shucked off.  Once you allow this to happen, of course, the structure of logic in your thought becomes inescapable.  And it is impossible to find within logic rules about how things become predicates, because those would need to be predicates themselves.

A quick thought experiment:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.

All men are mortal.
Jesus is a man.
Jesus is mortal?

The first is a pretty standard syllogism, and holds true.  The second has exactly the same structure, and effectively the same first two lines.  But because the third line is open to debate, that brings into question the statement "Socrates is mortal."  Because of an apparent contradiction to the rule, we must clarify the first two lines:

All men who are not also gods are mortal.
Socrates is a man who is not also a god.
Socrates is mortal.

However, because the only thing about being a god that concerns us in this case is immortality, we might as well write the syllogism like this:

All men who are not immortal are mortal

Socrates is a man who is not immortal

Socrates is mortal.

Because there is always a possibility that predicates will need to be expanded, logic can never step outside of its rules to tell us anything about the world.  It can only move predicates around in a way that ultimately is only reflexively true.

One further problem with predicates is that the limits of our language provide the limits of our predicates.  We can use "snow" in a variety of syllogisms, but in a language with over 20 words for "snow", some of those syllogisms may be false.  Logic is, at its best, a tool to analyze our use of language, and at its worst, a tool of Western male imperialism.

Just because it is foolishness to the Greeks, doesn't mean that it is foolishness.