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What is logic?

aeon.co

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: What is logic?

#11
My take: it's a human means of systematically exploring implications of already accepted beliefs.

There are implicit and explicit forms of it.

The implicit form is something our brains do automatically and is a consequence of its structure. Perhaps the way it models things intrinsically does not allow for what we would call contradicting statements (though it contains many separate models which if unified would contain contradictions); then, the space of desirable implications is narrowed by a motivation to find a certain kind of implication (i.e. there is typically a goal when engaging in reasoning—we aren't often indifferently interested in all implications) combined with the fact that contradictions aren't allowed. It seems like implications are usually discovering that some entity belongs to a class it wasn't previously known to belong to, at which point it inherits the attributes of other things in that class.

The explicit forms seem like attempts to model the implicit form in mathematical language, in order to bring logical processes more under control of conscious thought, or 'executive function' (plus reasoning on paper extends working memory). It seems possible that with the 'correct' formulation, a logic could viewed as a theoretical science describing properties of the structure of the human brain that give rise to reasoning.

Re: What is logic?

#12
post #8
post #3

From what I know, pure logic or even math are useless without assumptions. This is what reason and science give us: a standard set of axioms from which logic and math can lead us to useful conclusions.

Where can I find this standard set of axioms?

I'm not sure what the parent commenter means by "reason and science" giving us axioms, but for mathematics the most common axiomatic system is ZFC set theory. Some of the axioms are easy to understand even with a mathematics background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...

Re: What is logic?

#13
post #3

From what I know, pure logic or even math are useless without assumptions. This is what reason and science give us: a standard set of axioms from which logic and math can lead us to useful conclusions.

I don't think I would agree with the general statement that science gives us axioms. In normal usage, "axioms" are not the same as scientific "givens" or "data" even though it makes sense to interpret the word that way. In math and logic, the axioms we use are typically very foundational. We might say, "the empty set exists," or "for all x, it holds that x = x." There's no need to invoke science for these sorts of axioms and we can make many useful conclusions without it.

Re: What is logic?

#14
post #3

From what I know, pure logic or even math are useless without assumptions. This is what reason and science give us: a standard set of axioms from which logic and math can lead us to useful conclusions.

Thing is, there is no universally accepted "standard set of axioms" in mathematics (let alone in all of "science"). Not since around the early 1900s anyway. Even assumptions that may seem obvious to most people, such as the famous Axiom of Choice, are only accepted provisionally in modern mathematical texts. In the extreme case of what is known as the "intuitionistic logic", even some of the most widely accepted laws of logical reasoning are rejected. If you add the fact (Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem) that given enough axioms there always be statements that are impossible to prove or disprove, the whole situation with logic will become, well, complicated.

Re: What is logic?

#15
Part of the fun of logic is realizing that there are multiple forms of it which change one's language and ability to express ideas. They also don't dominate one another—some statements' truth depends upon what logic they're formalized within.

Model theory is good here in that it studies the connection between logical language and more "physical" models. Some of these models can give a relatable account for what a logic "means". For instance, Boolean logic correspond with set operations and therefore we can use that correspondence to portray a meaning for statements in Boolean-like logics.

Intuitionistic logic is an interesting one if you're not familiar with it. It can be seen as the logic of working with "demonstrations", building and analyzing them. For instance, if I have an object "X" such that witnessing it immediately convinces someone of the truth of "1+1=2", and if I have a whole collection of such items, then intuitionistic logic talks about how to compose and decompose collections of these things. Another interesting operation is "not" such that "not X" is a tool for using any X you happen to have to show that the world is inconsistent. This acts as a refutation of the existence of values like X!

This differs from set-like logics because, for instance, "not (not X)" is not the same as X: being able to show that if you had (a way to prove the world inconsistent if you had an X) you could show the world as inconsistent... it's a far cry away from actually having an X!

Intuitionistic logic is interesting for two reasons. First, it models communication and persuasion by being an algebra of "persuasive items" like X. Second, it's "constructive" and thus works similarly to how programming languages express things through their creation.

Re: What is logic?

#16
post #2

"The idea that ordinary language is expressively inadequate to account for mathematical (or even logical) reasoning became a recurring theme in the ensuing tradition of mathematical logic, so much so that the term ‘symbolic logic’ became synonymous with this tradition. Doing logic came to mean simply working with special symbols, not with ordinary words. In this respect, it is worth noting that the humanist authors h…

> In a sense, perhaps a certain degree of ‘artificiality’ is at the core of logic throughout history, as it operates at levels of abstraction that are at odds with ordinary language usage Of course, you could say the exact same thing for programming languages (after all, what do programmers do if not "simply working with special symbols, not with ordinary words"? And isn't this the primary criticism of programming br…

On a slightly orthogonal note, I think that not only can you think of programming languages this way, but that you should—programming languages and formal logics are ultimately instances of the same general idea. I've found this to be a consistent and powerful view for reasoning about programs, programming languages, proofs and logics in a uniform sort of way.

The Curry-Howard correspondence is an important idea that's a specific instance of this, showing a direct relationship between specific kinds of logic and specific kinds of typed programming languages, but I think it's useful to think about programming languages that don't correspond to well-studied logical systems in a similar way.

This helps explain why the study of programming languages—and especially programming language theory—isn't really about programming languages: it's more about abstraction and reasoning in general. It's deeper than you'd suspect from the name. I'd go so far as saying that programming language theory is less a theory of programming languages and more a general theory of computation from a language point of view, as compared to "normal" theoretical CS.

Re: What is logic?

#17
post #2

"The idea that ordinary language is expressively inadequate to account for mathematical (or even logical) reasoning became a recurring theme in the ensuing tradition of mathematical logic, so much so that the term ‘symbolic logic’ became synonymous with this tradition. Doing logic came to mean simply working with special symbols, not with ordinary words. In this respect, it is worth noting that the humanist authors h…

> In a sense, perhaps a certain degree of ‘artificiality’ is at the core of logic throughout history, as it operates at levels of abstraction that are at odds with ordinary language usage Of course, you could say the exact same thing for programming languages (after all, what do programmers do if not "simply working with special symbols, not with ordinary words"? And isn't this the primary criticism of programming br…

"Obviate" does not mean "make obvious", as I think was intended here. "To obviate" means "to remove (a need or difficulty)".

Re: What is logic?

#18
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I find this standard set of axioms?

I'm not sure what the parent commenter means by "reason and science" giving us axioms, but for mathematics the most common axiomatic system is ZFC set theory. Some of the axioms are easy to understand even with a mathematics background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...

I would consider these to be mathematical axioms. I was looking for what pitaj was describing as coming from outside of math. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what pitaj was saying.

Re: What is logic?

#19
Gödel's arithmetization of logic is one hell of a beautiful mathematical idea, up there with linear algebra or probability theory. One of its big selling points for me was how easily it solves the unexpected hanging paradox. (The simplest arithmetization of the judge's self-referential statement is a statement about numbers that can be shown to be self-contradictory.) It's also cool how it turns Russell's paradox into Gödel's theorem, Curry's paradox into Löb's theorem, etc. The connections to algorithms and computability theory are also neat (Gödel's idea of "effectively axiomatized system" is any computer program that can print sentences, which has just the right amount of generality and connects to the halting problem in the obvious way). To me arithmetization is simply the right approach to logic, which easily subsumes everything that makes sense and rejects everything that doesn't.

Re: What is logic?

#20

Gödel's arithmetization of logic is one hell of a beautiful mathematical idea, up there with linear algebra or probability theory. One of its big selling points for me was how easily it solves the unexpected hanging paradox. (The simplest arithmetization of the judge's self-referential statement is a statement about numbers that can be shown to be self-contradictory.) It's also cool how it turns Russell's paradox int…

Do you have a recommendation for a book that covers these topics that's technical but not necessarily a text book?
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