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The textbook tradition Frontispiece, with title beginning "The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, plainlie set foorth in the English tounge, easie to be learned and practised". Dudley Fenner'sArt of Logic (1584) Traditional logic generally means the textbook tradition that begins with Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole's Logic, or the Art of Thinking, better known as the Port-Royal Logic.[71] Published in 1662, it was the most influential work on logic in England until the nineteenth century.[72] The book presents a loosely Cartesian doctrine (that the proposition is a combining of ideas rather than terms, for example) within a framework that is broadly derived from Aristotelian and medieval term logic. Between 1664 and 1700 there were eight editions, and the book had considerable influence after that.[72] The account of propositions that Locke gives in the Essay is essentially that of Port-Royal: "Verbal propositions, which are words, [are] the signs of our ideas, put together or separated in affirmative or negative sentences. So that proposition consists in the putting together or separating these signs, according as the things which they stand for agree or disagree." (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV. 5. 6) Another influential work was the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon, published in 1620. The title translates as "new instrument". This is a reference to Aristotle's work Organon. In this work, Bacon rejected the syllogistic method of Aristotle in favour of an alternative procedure "which by slow and faithful toil gathers information from things and brings it into understanding".[73] This method is known as inductive reasoning. The inductive method starts from empirical observation and proceeds to lower axioms or propositions. From the lower axioms more general ones can be derived (by induction). In finding the cause of a phenomenal nature such as heat, one must list all of the situations where heat is found. Then another list should be drawn up, listing situations that are similar to those of the first list except for the lack of heat. A third table lists situations where heat can vary. The form nature, or cause, of heat must be that which is common to all instances in the first table, is lacking from all instances of the second table and varies by degree in instances of the third table. Other works in the textbook tradition include Isaac Watts' Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason (1725), Richard Whately's Logic (1826), and John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843). Although the latter was one of the last great works in the tradition, Mill's view that the foundations of logic lay in introspection[74] influenced the view that logic is best understood as a branch of psychology, an approach to the subject which dominated the next fifty years of its development, especially in Germany.[75] Logic in Hegel's philosophy G.W.F. Hegel indicated the importance of logic to his philosophical system when he condensed his extensive Science of Logic into a shorter work published in 1817 as the first volume of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The "Shorter" or "Encyclopaedia" Logic, as it is often known, lays out a series of transitions which leads from the most empty and abstract of categories—Hegel begins with "Pure Being" and "Pure Nothing"—to the "Absolute, the category which contains and resolves all the categories which preceded it. Despite the title, Hegel's Logic is not really a contribution to the science of valid inference. Rather than deriving conclusions about concepts through valid inference from premises, Hegel seeks to show that thinking about one concept compels thinking about another concept (one cannot, he argues, possess the concept of "Quality" without the concept of "Quantity"); and the compulsion here is not a matter of individual psychology, but arises almost organically from the content of the concepts themselves. His purpose is to show the rational structure of the "Absolute"—indeed of rationality itself. The method by which thought is driven from one concept to its contrary, and then to further concepts, is known as the Hegelian dialectic. Although Hegel's Logic has had little impact on mainstream logical studies, its influence can be seen in Carl von Prantl's Geschichte der Logik in Abendland (1855–1867),[76] and in the work of the British Idealists—for example in F.H. Bradley's Principles of Logic (1883)—and in the economic, political and philosophical studies of Karl Marx and the various schools of Marxism. Logic and psychology Between the work of Mill and Frege stretched half a century during which logic was widely treated as a descriptive science, an empirical study of the structure of reasoning, and thus essentially as a branch of psychology.[77] The German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, for example, discussed deriving "the logical from the psychological laws of thought", emphasizing that "psychological thinking is always the more comprehensive form of thinking."[78] This view was widespread among German philosophers of the period: Theodor Lipps described logic as "a specific discipline of psychology";[79] Christoph von Sigwart understood logical necessity as grounded in the individual's compulsion to think in a certain way;[80] and Benno Erdmann argued that "logical laws only hold within the limits of our thinking"[81] Such was the dominant view of logic in the years following Mill's work.[82] This psychological approach to logic was rejected by Gottlob Frege. It was also subjected to an extended and destructive critique by Edmund Husserl in the first volume of his Logical Investigations (1900), an assault which has been described as "overwhelming".[83] Husserl argued forcefully that grounding logic in psychological observations implied that all logical truths remained unproven, and that skepticism and relativism were unavoidable consequences. Such criticisms did not immediately extirpate so-called "psychologism". For example, the American philosopher Josiah Royce, while acknowledging the force of Husserl's critique, remained "unable to doubt" that progress in psychology would be accompanied by progress in logic, and vice versa.[84] |
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