The Meaning of Logic

Aristotelian logic has been variously defined as the science and art of correct reasoning, of making correct inferences, or of correct thinking.
 
Ayn Rand makes the concept “correct” precise and fundamental by defining logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (p. 36). By “art” she means practice, or the practical application of concepts and principles to achieve a specific goal. Logic is therefore what she calls a concept of method, similar to such applied sciences as engineering and medicine, and even to the branches of philosophy, ethics and epistemology. All are concepts of method or, as one might say, “how-to” disciplines.
 
The goal of logic is to achieve true knowledge of reality, “true” being technically redundant, though we do sometimes talk about false or mistaken knowledge. The essential means of achieving knowledge is the correct—i.e., non-contradictory—formation and application of concepts, ensuring that the “in here” contents of our consciousness correctly recognizes what is “out there” in reality.*
 
For example, if I look to the side of my computer and identify the object sitting there as a little bearded man making shoes, when in fact the object is my glass of water, I have incorrectly identified reality. That is, the “in here” content of my consciousness that says there is a leprechaun on my desk has contradicted the “out there” facts. I have violated Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction and am holding a delusion of reality in my mind. Reality says glass of water; my mind says leprechaun.
 
Ayn Rand’s formulation of logic, I submit, focusing on the “in here” in relation to the “out there,” radically challenges the tradition of logic textbooks that have concentrated, in some cases exclusively, on the syllogism and deductive reasoning.
 
Over the centuries this tradition has given us both Scholastic and modern rationalism that is obsessed with deductive reasoning disconnected from the facts—such as endless debates about angels on the head of a pin, naked monads, or brains in a vat. The rules and validity of syllogism, a great discovery of Aristotle’s, are valuable to know in the construction of valid and true knowledge. And this includes discussions of contradictions in terms and argument consistency.
 
Rationalism, however, is a narrow focus on deductive reasoning at the expense of reality. This includes the unreality of economic theory that says capitalism must fit the mathematical formulas of “pure and perfect competition.” And the faux intellectual’s mistake that claims criminals by definition cannot be intelligent because they are irrational.
 
Rationalism can be described as a linguistic game of pushing words around. Proper syllogistic thinking and rationalism have certain similarities, namely relating one or more concepts to another, but a correct syllogism, in one of its forms, relates the subject of a conclusion to the predicate of what is called the major premise: all dogs have four legs, Fido is a dog, therefore Fido has four legs.
 
The textbooks spend huge amounts of time on these syllogistic forms, with mnemonic names like “Barbara” and “Celarent” and their propositions as “contraries,” “contradictories,” “subalterns,” etc., that only Medieval Scholastics would remember and use. All the layperson has to do is look at dogs, cats, and Fido to recognize that dogs are not cats, and Fido has four legs.
 
Rationalism, further, is not the deductive process of application that we all use every day, the deduction that identifies “a this as an instance of a that,” that is, the use of our previously formed (and correct) universal concepts to recognize the specific, concrete object that we eat breakfast on is a table. Rand calls this process “conceptual identification.” I call it application, of universals to concretes, and I include both application and the process of concept formation, of coming up with new universal concepts, under the general term of conceptualization.**
 
Excessive attention, however, in logic textbooks to an invalid syllogism that says all dogs and cats have four legs and therefore are the same, ignores or downplays a better, more sharpened focus on concept formation and application. Looking directly at reality means attending to the referents of each concept to identify the respective essential distinguishing characteristics of, say, dogs and cats as opposed to human beings.***
 
In the formation of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify similar existents distinguished from a broader category of other existents into a concept, further identified by a word.
 
In the application of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify one concrete existent as a member of an already known and held-in-mind concept.
 
Ayn Rand’s definition of logic makes the “how to” discipline of logic fundamentally connected to reality by emphasizing the distinction between consciousness and existence. Rationalism never gets out of consciousness.
 
In addition to the rationalism of the textbooks, I also question the excessive use by logicians of the word “proposition,” because I think it feeds into their rationalistic thinking. Aristotle’s word in the Greek is protasis and is usually translated as proposition, though the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon adds that the word especially means a premise in a syllogism. Today’s usage makes it a true or false statement.
 
My complaint is not that traditional logic texts are not worth reading—I have read three—I think the excessive use of proposition overlooks the significance of universals, especially thinking in universal principles, and their non-contradictory identification of the facts as Ayn Rand essentializes logic. The proposition and sentence “water with no impurities at sea level boils at 212º Fahrenheit” is not just a proposition or statement; it is a universal principle, with the word “universal” being redundant. (The texts I have read were written by H. W. B Joseph, 1916; Lionel Ruby, 1960; and David Kelley, 1988. They are less rationalistic than the typical logic text.)
 
Hence, my often-made assertion that theoretical knowledge—science—consists mainly of concepts and principles, not concepts and propositions. Yes, all sciences use many concepts that are universal and, at the same time, make many statements that are not universal, but it is the universal principles that give science its power. The science of history is the only exception in that its goal is to discover and report concrete facts of a life or event.
 
The rules of formal logic, in effect, are the grammar and syntax of deductive reasoning, and non-contradictory identification applies, but inductive reasoning requires getting oneself out of discussions of language to look directly at reality.
 
Ayn Rand in her discussion of abstraction from abstractions emphasizes the importance of tracing the links from broad abstractions to their roots in perceived concretes, in external reality. In an earlier post, I demonstrated this with three of Kant’s allegedly “a priori” concepts, namely space, time, and causality, that he said were innate and disconnected from perceptual reality. We perceive the meaning of space, for example, I wrote, by observing “a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was.” These three perceived concretes are the referents of the concept “space.”
 
This activity and, preferably, habit of retracing the links from broad abstraction to perceptual referent is not just what we might call an updated Aristotelian empiricism that says, “open your eyes and look at the world, then introspect to identify how you arrived at the concepts you have in your mind.” It is a means of maintaining a non-contradictory mental organization that requires and allows a sharp focus on the facts of reality.
 
A final note on definitions and thinking in definitions, which unfortunately is the rationalist’s favorite vehicle of argumentation, often by making grossly unrealistic assumptions, such as, “Let’s assume dogs can fly and see where that takes us.” Well-constructed definitions summarize and condense the content of our concepts and keep our knowledge connected both to reality and to the rest of the knowledge we already have. If “by definition” we mean arbitrary, disconnected floating abstractions and flimsily constructed tautologies, knowledge can be anything we want it to be, which is where we are today as consequence of Kant’s philosophy and his positivist followers.
 
 
* Of course, we, and our consciousness, are also a part of reality, which adds complications to the issue. See my discussion of Ayn Rand’s distinction between the metaphysical and epistemological as applied to consciousness.
 
** Rand does not seem to include application or conceptual identification under the term conceptualization. On her use of induction and deduction as the processes, respectively, of forming and applying concepts, see the last two paragraphs of chapter 3 in the Objectivist Epistemology. On her mentions of conceptual identification, see the third paragraph from the end of chapter 3 and page 50 in chapter 5.
 
*** This excessive, rationalistic attention of traditional logic, and the absurd, brain-twisting p’s and q’s of what is called symbolic “logic”—scare quotes intended—is what has given rise to critical thinking courses in today’s philosophy departments. Critical thinking as a concept is the attempt to bring reality and practicality back into logic, though the word “logic” is seldom used in those classes.