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Mostrando las entradas de septiembre 16, 2015

Am I a philosopher or a logician?

Last week, I was invited to a workshop on logicality, where Ives Beziaú mentioned that it was a shame that we used the same word “logic” to name both the philosophical discipline and its subject matter. This, he insisted, is a problem common to other disciplines like history and geography. Other disciplines, like ornithology or meteorology – my example, not his – do not have this problem and thus we can say what their subject of study is without sounding tautological: ornithology studies birds and meteorology studies the atmosphere. But what can we say about what logic studies? Well, it studies logic, of course! just like history studies history and geography studies geography. That is why it is very important to make a difference between logic as a philosophical discipline, with its theories, problems, concepts, etc. and logic as an aspect of reality, with its proper phenomena of propositions following one another, sets of them being consistent or inconsistent, etc. Just as t