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MURPHYS_LOGIC

                                             July    20, 2021
                                             December 4, 2021
From Paul Austin Murphy,
"John Dewey's Naturalist Position         https://www.cantorsparadise.com/john-deweys-naturalist-position-on-logic-s-relation-to-science-ac7b866bdcd9
on Logic's Relation to Science":

    "[Dewey] must have-- and did-- assume and
    use logical principles and truths (e.g.,
    the law of identity, the law of excluded
    middle and the law of non-contradiction)
    which he-- and others-- questioned and
    claimed to have a non-absolute status."

    Okay, but then:

    "Of course Dewey might well have
    assumed and used such logical
    principles, happily admitted that he
    did so, and yet still rejected their
    absolute (or eternal) status."

    Exactly.  Someone who argues that all logical
    principles should be regarded as provisional
    is not forbidden from using them provisionally.


On Dewey's position on logic:

    "In his eyes, logic should be derived from
    the methods and practices used in
    science. And because science is always on the
    move, then Dewey also believed ... that
    logicians shouldn't see logical principles as
    'eternal truths which have been laid down
    once and for all as supplying a pattern of
    reasoning to which all inquiry must conform'. "


    "... Dewey believed that just as science
    doesn't offer us eternal (or absolute)
    truths, neither should logic."

Paul Austin Murphy makes an interesting point:

    "As with mathematics, even if logic does have
    eternal principles and truths which somehow
    exist mind-independently in an abstract realm,
    it doesn't at all follow that logicians and
    mathematicians-- any logicians and
    mathematicians-- have unadulterated access to
    them.  Perhaps most logicians and
    mathematicians simply haven't discovered (or
    arrived at) all-- or even any-- of these
    eternal principles and truths."

    " ... Having said all that, logicians and
    mathematicians may still have good reasons for     This last remark is
    believing in this Platonic world's existence--     hillarious.  Platonists
    even if they know little about it."                have total commitment to
                                                       their True Faith.




    "It was primarily Dewey's scepticism about eternal (or
    absolute) logical truths and principles which made him
    decide that logicians should base their principles,
    methods, inferential patterns, etc. on what actually
    happens in science."

    "In other words, logic should be fallibilist--"

            Ah, I see Murphy is a firm believer in big-obscure-wordism.
            Why exactly would us use these "other words"?

                                    Is the idea just
                                    "fallible"?


    "Indeed philosophers like W.V.O. Quine (in
    the mid-20th century) were fallibilists when
    it came to both mathematics and
    logic. Moreover, Quine even became a                 If you believe
    pragmatist about the Law of Excluded Middle          Schroedinger's
    (or at least its applicability) in response          cat can be both
    to the findings of quantum mechanics ..."            alive and dead,
                                                         then you've
                                                         given up on
                                                         the idea that
                                                         you can't have
                                                         both A and not-A.

  Murphy goes on to make the point that
  some philosophers concluded that future
  events are not currently true or false,
  hence there needs to be a logic with a
  third value: "indeterminate".



     "It can now also be argued that certain
     scientists had rejected the Law of Excluded
     Middle and the Principle of Bivalence long
     before most philosophers and logicians had
     rejected them."

       So Dewey's position in the early 1900s
       can be called "prescient", no?




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