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What logic should we think with?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

R. M. Sainsbury
Affiliation:
King's College, London

Extract

Logic ought to guide our thinking. It is better, more rational, more intelligent to think logically than to think illogically. Illogical thought leads to bad judgment and error. In any case, if logic had no role to play as a guide to thought, why should we bother with it?

The somewhat naïve opinions of the previous paragraph are subject to attack from many sides. It may be objected that an activity does not count as thinking at all unless it is at least minimally logical, so logic is constitutive of thought rather than a guide to it. Or it may be objected that whereas logic describes a system of timeless relations between propositions, thinking is a dynamic process involving revisions, and so could not use a merely static guide. Or again the objection may be that there is no such thing as logic, only a whole variety of different logics, not all of which could possibly be good guides.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2002

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References

Further Reading

Harman, Gilbert (1986), Change in View. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Burge, Tyler (1974), ‘Truth and singular terms,’ Nous 8, 309–25. Reprinted in Lambert, Karel Philosophical Applications of Free Logic, Oxford, New York, 1991, pp. 189–204.Google Scholar
Edgington, Dorothy (1995), ‘On conditionals,’ Mind 104.414, 235329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haack, Susan (1974), Deviant Logic: Some Philosophical Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dummett, Michael (1978), ‘The justification of deduction’. In his Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Field, Hartry (1996) ‘The aprioricity of logic.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96, 359–79.Google Scholar
Pollock, John L. and Cruz, Joseph (1999) Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Second edition; first edition with Pollock as sole author 1985.Google Scholar