2 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: Logic has no foundation - except in metaphysics. Hegel explains why.
So clickbait article title aside, this is an interesting discussion of Hegel, and as I’m not a Hegel scholar I feel I have learned something interesting about his take on what I would call Ontology in the context of his philosophy. I think the point about metaphysics, however, makes sense as an archaeological interpretation of how we have come to the position we have today more than it does an accurate picture of things as they now are.
The turn from metaphysics happens significantly further down the chain, when we come to understand that the plurality of the world outstrips the simple individual perspective. That is to say, the “psychologistic” view, that there is not one single true way to think but we develop new faculties as we grow and explore and test and refine and observe them in others, is right, and the idea of a single true metaphysics cannot withstand the desert of the real.
But this does not mean that logic has no foundation or even that such a foundation is only given by metaphysics and that logic therefore cannot function. What we have, rather, is **protocol** - similar to metaphysics but which is understood to be malleable and amenable to reframing, vulnerable to human bias and heuristic and thus potentially fallible, contextual and thus reflective of local differences of opinion and experience but equally revisable as part of the wider empirical paradigm of proposing models and submitting them to tests of operational effectiveness.
Logic, too, can be understood as plural, in as much as it helps us navigate the modality of truth and consequence in the variations of protocol, and a skilful logician understands not just the rules within protocols but also both their commonalities and inter-operations, and their variations and nuances, and is capable of operating, reasoning and negotiating within and across them. While one should, in order to be efficacious, understand and use the logic of one’s own frame of reference clearly and accurately, in fact this is rarely the mode in which we operate - far more often do we sit in virtual worlds of language games and social simulacra, and the ability to critically recognise, engage with, and also keep at arms length without losing agency over them is equally important as a person in the world.
What’s more, the logic we apply to ourselves often comes *later*, informed by what we experience, and when we turn it back inwards we often find new forms of reason, observation and being than we originally understood.
So logic clearly can exist as a discipline founded in something important, and I believe the dismissal of the psychologist’s view is carried out too quickly here.
There's nothing here!