The Logic of Logic

 Logic is a method that allows us to acquire valid knowledge of a target domain by allowing us to discriminate between truth and falsehood. How can logic tell us what is true and false? It does not serve in the capacity of acquisition of information but it allows us to critically assess the information to sort out truth and falsehood. Thus we may see a stick bent in water but reason convinces us that it is an illusion.

How do we arrive at such a method? We try to think through cases where we have valid knowledge as opposed where we don’t and then we try to see what is common in those cases and this occasions the philosophical reflection about what is valid knowledge and why are we able to gain such knowledge at all. Obviously the capacity must pre-exist for there to be logic but by turning the torchlight towards this capacity and inquiring about its condition of success we can develop a method which if followed would enhance this capacity to discriminate between truth and falsehood. In this there is nothing special for methods in any field are constructed in the reflective mode. The existential mode is the mode of practice and spontaneity for the validity of method is assumed and applied spontaneously. The reflective mode breaks this spontaneity and examines the method to improve and enhance it for better functioning. Hence the questions about the justification of principles and justification based on those principles must be kept separate.

How do we arrive at the principles? Principles do not just tell us what is the case they tell us why it is the case. The 17th Century Rationalists believed we have a faculty - Reason - that allows us to see the principles just like sense-perception reveals objects in everyday life. Obviously we cannot simply see it but by analyzing or removing the hindrances to a clear and distinct perception of the principles can we finally be able to grasp these principles. There are others who believe that we arrive at these principles inductively - by extracting them from observed cases of reasoning correctly. Rationalists believe that this is wrong because since everything is justified through these principles; the principles must themselves must be self-evident or else there would be an infinite regress of justification. Hence the importance of the cogito to the rationalists for the highest evidence we have of anything is self-consciousness and the knowledge of principles must be grounded in self-consciousness to acquire that level of certainty. In the end self-consciousness itself is grounded in God and hence he is the highest level of certainty we possess. But it seems to me that Rationalists have elevated Reason to a level where it becomes indistinguishable with mysticism because the gulf created between reason and experience is an unbridgeable one. Since metaphysical truths about God and Soul cannot be known through experience Rationalists believed they have a faculty that can cut off from its base in experience and provide us metaphysical knowledge entirely on its own. Reason is a faculty posited to overcome the poverty of perception which can only provide us information about sensible qualities like color, size, shape etc. but not substance, cause, being etc. Empiricists like Hume exploited this gap and used imagination instead of Reason to fill this gap. Hence the moral should be that reason should base its moves on experience and we should correct the picture of experience which separates sensibility from understanding and that gives us a very impoverished conception of experience. There is no point in making reason merely co-ordinate with experience but the leap of Reason should be based on a firm ground in experience.

I believe that we acquire knowledge of principles through insight but this insight is the result of a long drawn out process of analysis of actual cases. This is also the basis of my answer to skepticism. We cannot know a-priori that principles can be applied to reality as such but we also cannot know a-priori that they don’t. Hence the application of principles or the intersection of thought and reality has to be proved and that is only possible post an inquiry and not before one. Only by constant and diligent inquiry can we know how far we can apply general principles to particular cases and know the limits of our inquiry. Hence validity and invalidity is in the application and cannot be assumed beforehand.