International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

I wish now to take up seriatim the several questions touching the various relations of logic enumerated above, and first of all the question of the relation of logic as science to logic as art.

I. Logic as science and logic as art.

It seems true that the founder of logic, Aristotle, regarded logic not as a science, but rather as propædeutic to science, and not as an end in itself, but rather technically and heuristically as an instrument. In other words, logic was conceived by him rather in its application or as an art, than as a science, and so it continued to be regarded until the close of the Middle Ages, being characterized indeed as the ars artium; for even the logica docens of the Scholastics was merely the formulation of that body of precepts which are of practical service in the syllogistic arrangement of premises, and the Port Royal Logic aims to furnish l'art de penser. This technical aspect of the science has clung to it down to the present day, and is no doubt a legitimate description of a part of its function. But no one would now say that logic is an art; rather it is a body of theory which may be technically applied. Mill, in his examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (p. 391), says of logic that it "is the art of thinking, which means of correct thinking, and the science of the conditions of correct thinking," and indeed, he goes so far as to say (System of Logic, Introd. § 7): "The extension of logic as a science is determined by its necessities as an art." Strictly speaking, logic as a science is purely theoretical, for the function of science as such is merely to know. It is an organized system of knowledge, namely, an organized system of the principles and conditions of correct thinking. But because correct thinking is an art, it does not follow that a knowledge of the methods and conditions of correct thinking is art, which would be a glaring case of μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος. The art-bearings of the science are given in the normative character of its subject-matter. As a science logic is descriptive and explanatory, that is, it describes and formulates the norms of valid thought, although as science it is not normative, save in the sense that the principles formulated in it may be normatively or regulatively applied, in which case they become precepts. What is principle in science becomes precept in application, and it is only when technically applied that principles assume a mandatory character. Validity is not created by logic. Logic merely investigates and states the conditions and criteria of validity, being in this reference a science of evidence. In the very fact, however, that logic is normative in the sense of describing and explaining the norms of correct thinking, its practical or applied character is given. Its principles as known are science; its principles as applied are art. There is, therefore, no reason to sunder these two things or to call logic an art merely or a science merely; for it is both when regarded from different viewpoints, although one must insist on the fact that the rules for practical guidance are, so far as the science is concerned, quite ab extra. Logic, ethics, and æsthetics are all commonly (and rightly) called normative disciplines: they are all concerned with values and standards; logic with validity and evidence, or values for cognition; ethics with motives and moral quality in conduct, or values for volition; æsthetics with the standards of beauty, or values for appreciation and feeling. Yet none of them is or can be merely normative, or indeed as science normative at all; if that were so, they would not be bodies of organized knowledge, but bodies of rules. They might be well-arranged codes of legislation on conduct, fine art, and evidence, but not sciences. Strictly regarded, it is the descriptive and explanatory aspect of logic that constitutes its scientific character, while it is the specific normative aspect that constitutes its logical character. Values, whether ethical or logical, without an examination and formulation of their ground, relations, origin, and interconnection, would be merely rules of thumb, popular phrases, or pastoral precepts. The actual methodology of the sciences or applied logic is logic as art.

II. Relation of logic to psychology.

The differentiation of logic and psychology in such way as to be of practical value in the discussion of the disciplines has always been a difficult matter. John Stuart Mill was disposed to merge logic in psychology, and Hobhouse, his latest notable apologete, draws no fixed distinction between psychology and logic, merely saying that they have different centres of interest, and that their provinces overlap. Lipps, in his Grundzüge der Logik (p. 2), goes the length of saying that "Logic is a psychological discipline, as certainly as knowledge occurs only in the Psyche, and thought, which is developed in knowledge, is a psychical event." Now, if we were to take such extreme ground as this, their ethics, æsthetics, and pure mathematics would become at once branches of psychology and not coördinate disciplines with it, for volitions, the feelings of appreciation, and the reasoning of pure mathematics are psychical events. Such a theory plainly carries us too far and would involve us in confusion. That the demarcation between the two disciplines is not a chasmic cleavage, but a line, and that, too, an historically shifting line, is apparent from the foregoing historical résumé.

The four main phases of logical theory include: (1) the concept (although some logicians begin with the judgment as temporally prior in the evolution of language), (2) judgment, (3) inference, (4) the methodology of the sciences. The entire concern of logic is, indeed, with psychical processes, but with psychical processes regarded from a specific standpoint, a standpoint different from that of psychology. In the first place psychology in a certain sense is much wider than logic, being concerned with the whole of psychosis as such, including the feelings and will and the entire structure of cognition, whereas logic is concerned with the particular cognitive processes enumerated above (concept, judgment, inference), and that, too, merely from the point of view of validity and the grounds of validity. In another sense psychology is narrower than logic, being concerned purely with the description and explanation of a particular field of phenomena, whereas logic is concerned with the procedure of all the sciences and is practically related to them as their formulated method. The compass and aims of the two disciplines are different; for while psychology is in different references both wider and narrower than logic, it is also different in the problems it sets itself, its aim being to describe and explain the phenomena of mind in the spirit of empirical science, whereas the aim of logic is only to explain and establish the laws of evidence and standards of validity. Logic is, therefore, selective and particular in the treatment of mental phenomena, whereas psychology is universal, that is, it covers the entire range of mental processes as a phenomenalistic science; logic dealing with definite elements as a normative science. By this it is not meant that the territory of judgment and inference should be delivered from the psychologist into the care of the logician; through such a division of labor both disciplines would suffer. The two disciplines handle to some extent the same subjects, so far as names are concerned; but the essence of the logical problem is not touched by psychology, and should not be mixed up with it, to the confusion and detriment of both disciplines. The field of psychology, as we have said, is the whole of psychical phenomena; the aim of individual psychology in the investigation of its field is: (1) to give a genetic account of cognition, feeling, and will, or whatever be the elements into which consciousness is analyzed; (2) to explain their interconnections causally; (3) as a chemistry of mental life to analyze its complexes into their simplest elements; (4) to explain the totality structurally (or functionally) out of the elements; (5) to carry on its investigation and set forth its results as a purely empirical science; (6) psychology makes no attempt to evaluate the processes of mind either in terms of false and true, or good and bad. From this description of the field and function of psychology, based on the expressions of its modern exponents, it will be found impossible to shelter logic under it as a subordinate discipline. If one were to enlarge the scope of psychology to mean rational psychology, in the sense which Professor Howison advocates (Psychological Review, vol. iii, p. 652), such a subordination might be possible, but it would entail the loss of all that the new psychology has gained by the sharper delimitation of its sphere and problems, and would carry us back to the position of Mill, who appears to identify psychology with philosophy at large and with metaphysics.

In contradistinction to the aims of psychology as described in the foregoing, the sphere and problems of logic may be summarily characterized as follows: (1) All concepts and judgments are psychological complexes and processes and may be genetically and structurally described; that is the business of psychology. They also have a meaning value, or objective reference, that is, they may be correct or incorrect, congruous or incongruous with reality. The meaning, aspect of thought, or its content as truth is the business of logic. This subject-matter is got by regarding a single aspect in the total psychological complex. (2) Its aim is not to describe factual thought or the whole of thought, or the natural processes of thought, but only certain ideals of thinking, namely, the norms of correct thinking. Its object is not a datum, but an ideal. (3) While psychology is concerned with the natural history of reasoning, logic is concerned with the warrants of inferential reasoning. In the terminology of Hamilton it is the nomology of discursive thought. To use an often employed analogy, psychology is the physics of thought, logic an ethics of thought. (4) Logic implies an epistemology or theory of cognition in so far as epistemology discusses the concept and judgment and their relations to the real world, and here is to be found its closest connection with psychology. A purely formal logic, which is concerned merely with the internal order of knowledge and does not undertake to show how the laws of thought originate, why they hold good as the measures of evidence, or in what way they are applicable to concrete reality, would be as barren as scholasticism. (5) While logic thus goes back to epistemology for its bases and for the theoretical determination of the interrelation of knowledge and truth, it goes forward in its application to the practical service of the sciences as their methodology. Apart of its subject-matter is therefore the actual procedure of the sciences, which it attempts to organize into systematic statements as principles and formulæ. This body of rules given implicitly or explicitly in the workings and structure of the special sciences, consisting in classification, analysis, experiment, induction, deduction, nomenclature, etc., logic regards as a concrete deposit of inferential experience. It abstracts these principles from the content and method of the sciences, describes and explains them, erects them into a systematic methodology, and so creates the practical branch of real logic. Formal logic, therefore, according to the foregoing account, would embrace the questions of the internal congruity and self-consistency of thought and the schematic arrangement of judgments to insure formally valid conclusions; real logic would embrace the epistemological questions of how knowledge is related to reality, and how it is built up out of experience, on the one hand, and the methodological procedure of science, on the other. The importance of mathematical logic seems to be mainly in the facilitation of logical expression through symbols. It is rather with the machinery of the science than with its content and real problem that the logical algorithm or calculus is concerned. In these condensed paragraphs sufficient has been said, I think, to show that logic and psychology should be regarded as coördinate disciplines; for their aims and subject-matter differ too widely to subordinate the former under the latter without confusion to both.

I wish now to add a brief note on the relation of logic to another discipline.

III. Relation of logic to metaphysics.

As currently expounded, logic either abuts immediately on the territory of metaphysics at certain points or is entirely absorbed in it as an integral part of the metaphysical subject-matter. I regard the former view as not only the more tenable theoretically, but as practically advantageous for working purposes, and necessary for an intelligible classification of the philosophical disciplines. The business of metaphysics, as I understand it, is with the nature of reality; logic is concerned with the nature of validity, or with the relations of the elements of thought within themselves (self-consistency) and with the relations of thought to its object (real truth), but not with the nature of the objective world or reality as such. Further, metaphysics is concerned with the unification of the totality of knowledge in the form of a scientific cosmology; logic is concerned merely with the inferential and methodological processes whereby this result is reached. The former is a science of content; the latter is a science of procedure and relations. Now, inasmuch as procedure and relations apply to some reality and differ with different forms of reality, logic necessitates in its implications a theory of being, but such implications are in no wise to be identified with its subject-matter or with its own proper problems. Their consideration falls within the sphere of metaphysics or a broadly conceived epistemology, whose business it is to solve the ultimate questions of subject and object, thought and thing, mind and matter, that are implied and pointed to rather than formulated by logic. Inasmuch as the logical judgment says something about something, the scientific impulse drives us to investigate what the latter something ultimately is; but this is not necessary for logic, nor is it one of logic's legitimate problems, any more than it is the proper business of the physicist to investigate the mental implications of his scientific judgments and hypotheses or the ultimate nature of the theorizing and perceiving mind, or of causality to his world of matter and motion, although a general scientific interest may drive him to seek a solution of these ultimate metaphysical problems. Scientifically the end of logic and of every discipline is in itself; it is a territorial unity, and its government is administered with a unitary aim. Logic is purely a science of evidential values, not a science of content (in the meaning of particular reality, as in the special sciences, or of ultimate reality, as in metaphysics); its sole aim and purpose, as I conceive it, is to formulate the laws and grounds of evidence, the principles of method, and the conditions and forms of inferential thinking. When it has done this, it has, as a single science, done its whole work. When one looks at the present tendencies of logical theory, one is inclined to believe that the discipline is in danger of becoming an "Allerleiwissenschaft," whose vast undefined territory is the land of "Weissnichtwo." The strict delimitation of the field and problems of science is demanded in the interest of a serviceable division of scientific labor and in the interest of an intelligible classification of the accumulated products of research.