philosophy of logic

Written by Jaakko J. Hintikka

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Key People:: Hilary Putnam; Gottlob Frege; Sir Michael A.E. Dummett

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philosophy of logic, the study, from a philosophical perspective, of the nature and types of logic, including problems in the field and the relation of logic to mathematics and other disciplines.

The term logic comes from the Greek word logos. The variety of senses that logos possesses may suggest the difficulties to be encountered in characterizing the nature and scope of logic. Among the partial translations of logos, there are “sentence,” “discourse,” “reason,” “rule,” “ratio,” “account” (especially the account of the meaning of an expression), “rational principle,” and “definition.” Not unlike this proliferation of meanings, the subject matter of logic has been said to be the “laws of thought,” “the rules of right reasoning,” “the principles of valid argumentation,” “the use of certain words labelled ‘logical constants’,” “truths (true propositions) based solely on the meanings of the terms they contain,” and so on.

Logic as a discipline

Nature and varieties of logic

It is relatively easy to discern some order in the above embarrassment of explanations. Some of the characterizations are in fact closely related to each other. When logic is said, for instance, to be the study of the laws of thought, these laws cannot be the empirical (or observable) regularities of actual human thinking as studied in psychology; they must be laws of correct reasoning, which are independent of the psychological idiosyncrasies of the thinker. Moreover, there is a parallelism between correct thinking and valid argumentation: valid argumentation may be thought of as an expression of correct thinking, and the latter as an internalization of the former. In the sense of this parallelism, laws of correct thought will match those of correct argumentation. The characteristic mark of the latter is, in turn, that they do not depend on any particular matters of fact. Whenever an argument that takes a reasoner from p to q is valid, it must hold independently of what he happens to know or believe about the subject matter of p and q. The only other source of the certainty of the connection between p and q, however, is presumably constituted by the meanings of the terms that the propositions p and q contain. These very same meanings will then also make the sentence “If p, then q” true irrespective of all contingent matters of fact. More generally, one can validly argue from p to q if and only if the implication “If p, then q” is logically true—i.e., true in virtue of the meanings of words occurring in p and q, independently of any matter of fact.

Logic may thus be characterized as the study of truths based completely on the meanings of the terms they contain.

In order to accommodate certain traditional ideas within the scope of this formulation, the meanings in question may have to be understood as embodying insights into the essences of the entities denoted by the terms, not merely codifications of customary linguistic usage.

The following proposition (from Aristotle), for instance, is a simple truth of logic: “If sight is perception, the objects of sight are objects of perception.” Its truth can be grasped without holding any opinions as to what, in fact, the relationship of sight to perception is. What is needed is merely an understanding of what is meant by such terms as “if–then,” “is,” and “are,” and an understanding that “object of” expresses some sort of relation.

The logical truth of Aristotle’s sample proposition is reflected by the fact that “The objects of sight are objects of perception” can validly be inferred from “Sight is perception.”

Many questions nevertheless remain unanswered by this characterization. The contrast between matters of fact and relations between meanings that was relied on in the characterization has been challenged, together with the very notion of meaning. Even if both are accepted, there remains a considerable tension between a wider and a narrower conception of logic. According to the wider interpretation, all truths depending only on meanings belong to logic. It is in this sense that the word logic is to be taken in such designations as “epistemic logic” (logic of knowledge), “doxastic logic” (logic of belief), “deontic logic” (logic of norms), “the logic of science,” “inductive logic,” and so on. According to the narrower conception, logical truths obtain (or hold) in virtue of certain specific terms, often called logical constants. Whether they can be given an intrinsic characterization or whether they can be specified only by enumeration is a moot point. It is generally agreed, however, that they include (1) such propositional connectives as “not,” “and,” “or,” and “if–then” and (2) the so-called quantifiers “(∃x)” (which may be read: “For at least one individual, call it x, it is true that”) and “(∀x)” (“For each individual, call it x, it is true that”). The dummy letter x is here called a bound (individual) variable. Its values are supposed to be members of some fixed class of entities, called individuals, a class that is variously known as the universe of discourse, the universe presupposed in an interpretation, or the domain of individuals. Its members are said to be quantified over in “(∃x)” or “(∀x).” Furthermore, (3) the concept of identity (expressed by =) and (4) some notion of predication (an individual’s having a property or a relation’s holding between several individuals) belong to logic. The forms that the study of these logical constants take are described in greater detail in the article logic, in which the different kinds of logical notation are also explained. Here, only a delineation of the field of logic is given.

When the terms in (1) alone are studied, the field is called propositional logic. When (1), (2), and (4) are considered, the field is the central area of logic that is variously known as first-order logic, quantification theory, lower predicate calculus, lower functional calculus, or elementary logic. If the absence of (3) is stressed, the epithet “without identity” is added, in contrast to first-order logic with identity, in which (3) is also included.

Borderline cases between logical and nonlogical constants are the following (among others): (1) Higher order quantification, which means quantification not over the individuals belonging to a given universe of discourse, as in first-order logic, but also over sets of individuals and sets of n-tuples of individuals. (Alternatively, the properties and relations that specify these sets may be quantified over.) This gives rise to second-order logic. The process can be repeated. Quantification over sets of such sets (or of n-tuples of such sets or over properties and relations of such sets) as are considered in second-order logic gives rise to third-order logic; and all logics of finite order form together the (simple) theory of (finite) types. (2) The membership relation, expressed by ∊, can be grafted on to first-order logic; it gives rise to set theory. (3) The concepts of (logical) necessity and (logical) possibility can be added.

This narrower sense of logic is related to the influential idea of logical form. In any given sentence, all of the nonlogical terms may be replaced by variables of the appropriate type, keeping only the logical constants intact. The result is a formula exhibiting the logical form of the sentence. If the formula results in a true sentence for any substitution of interpreted terms (of the appropriate logical type) for the variables, the formula and the sentence are said to be logically true (in the narrower sense of the expression).