全 6 件のコメント

[–]ccmulliganphil. of law, jurisprudence, continental, early modern phil. 6ポイント7ポイント  (2子コメント)

It seems that the world, or objective reality, obeys logic. Or else we couldn't describe it so well with science.

Does it? I would think Mr. Kant might have something to say about that.

we are extremely good in reason or logic,

Are we really? I think most psychologists would agree that, on the whole, people are really good at being illogical.

that is why we are so 'succesful' in mastering the objective world.

Are we really, though? Don't we define the conditions for success? Seems like stacking the deck.

So essentially what I'm asking is why reason, or logic pretty much is how the world works.

I again point you to Mr. Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." It turns out that logic isn't how the world works, but rather that you couldn't even begin to understand the world in any other terms, so you in effect supply the "logical" nature of your experience.

[–]b2q[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thanks for your answer, i have not read Critique of pure reason.

About humans as a population not deserving the praise in 'masters of reason' I agree. I was more praising the results of science, product of humans.

Could you maybe explain why logic isn't the way how the world works? I can see that we can't understand it in any other terms i guess, but I don't get how that implies that logic isn't part of objective world.

[–]ccmulliganphil. of law, jurisprudence, continental, early modern phil. [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Logic could be a feature of things in themselves. You don't know what things in themselves are like, because you can't step out from behind your own experience to see things as they are outside of experience.

[–]yellowfattybean 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Your claim that "language is part logic" is problematic. I would reverse that: Logic is a linguistic phenomenon. Logic is the study of inferences, of how the truths of some statements relates to the truths of other statements. "Truth" is a property of statements, not objects. A rock is neither true nor false, it's the things we say about the rock that are true or false.

But I'm not sure it's correct to say that reality "obeys" the laws of logic. Our description of reality are reliably consistent. . . but the universe doesn't know or care about that, does it?

[–]LeeHyori 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

It seems that the world, or objective reality, obeys logic ... logic pretty much is how the world works

I am going to give the non-idealist (non-Kantian) answer, and say that what you are talking about is whether reality, in some sense, conforms to logic. (Or, the other way around: we invented a formal system of logic that, at its core, just reflects reality.)

Well, we might think of it this way:

Syntactically, logic is just a game of little symbols. If you see a P, and a Q, and a little arrow in between, and then see another P, then you can write a Q. Those are just the rules of the game.

However, the semantics of our logic is one of truth. The semantic interpretation is as follows: If the premises are true, then the conclusion is also true. Keep in mind that we can do "logic" without ever talking about the concept of "truth": namely, when it's just a little symbol game.

When we add notions of "truth" to our logic, we give it meaning. It is the semantics to our syntax.

Now, think of geometry. Back in the day, we only had Euclidean geometry. Nowadays, we have non-Euclidean geometry. The reason why non-Euclidean geometries weren't popular back in the day was not because people were too dumb back then and couldn't create geometries that were logically consistent and didn't include Euclid's parallel postulate. Rather, it was because there seemed to be no use for it. It was just ... a symbol game, since there was no "model" or semantics for it. Originally, people thought that Euclidean geometry described the world, so its "meaning" or "model" was essentially the universe or reality. That's why it was #1.

However, after Einstein, we learned that the universe actually isn't Euclidean: that the actual structure of space violates Euclid's parallel postulate. What this did was give a serious boost to non-Euclidean geometries, since now we know that Euclidean geometry wasn't actually instantiated or modeled by the universe, or reality. Conversely, now we had a model for non-Euclidean geometries. Non-Euclideans stopped just being mental gymnastics and symbol games. This breathed life and meaning into them.

So, away from geometry and back to logic. Our semantics or "model" of logic is given in terms of truth. But what is "truth"? Many would say that "truth" is just that which represents (corresponds) with reality. Some statement is true if and only if it holds in reality. "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is actually on the mat. So, reality is the model of logic.

If that's the case, then logic really is a matter of the "world" and "reality", as you suggested. Let's think about it intuitively, too. Classical logic says that A is A, A or ~A and ~(A and ~A). Now let's think of reality. If something is the case, then it is the case. If I see a ball, the ball is the ball. Secondly, either this is the ball, or it isn't the ball. And finally, it's never that something is the ball and isn't the ball at the same time. You've always observed these things to be true about the world around you.

So, to answer your question, logic "works so well" because it is a true reflection of reality. It's just our formalization of reality. Inversely, I guess we can say, as you did, that "objective reality obeys logic".

[–]completely-ineffable [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Now, think of geometry. Back in the day, we only had Euclidean geometry. Nowadays, we have non-Euclidean geometry. The reason why non-Euclidean geometries weren't popular back in the day was not because people were too dumb back then and couldn't create geometries that were logically consistent and didn't include Euclid's parallel postulate. Rather, it was because there seemed to be no use for it. It was just ... a symbol game, since there was no "model" or semantics for it. Originally, people thought that Euclidean geometry described the world, so its "meaning" or "model" was essentially the universe or reality. That's why it was #1.

However, after Einstein, we learned that the universe actually isn't Euclidean: that the actual structure of space violates Euclid's parallel postulate. What this did was give a serious boost to non-Euclidean geometries, since now we know that Euclidean geometry wasn't actually instantiated or modeled by the universe, or reality. Conversely, now we had a model for non-Euclidean geometries. Non-Euclideans stopped just being mental gymnastics and symbol games. This breathed life and meaning into them. This is bad history of mathematics.

To start, many believed that the parallel postulate was entailed by the other axioms of Euclid's geometry and tried to find a proof of this. That is, they thought non-Euclidean geometry was logically inconsistent. Once non-Euclidean geometry became an object of study, it's not the case that it was seen as just a symbol game or that it lacked models. In 1868, about half a century before Einstein first published on relativity, Beltrami produced models of a hyperbolic geometry.