Topics Logic

Question When you ask why people believe in logic, it seems to me that the commonest answer is, "It works." But that answer seems problematic to me; how do you know it won't stop working? I guess what I'm asking is -- are logical laws nothing more than empirical regularities, models of how things behave? Are logical laws any different from empirical laws? Is there any stronger reason to have faith in logic apart from the fact that it works and has always worked?

Accepted:
August 16, 2016

Comments

Yes: As I see it, logical

Yes: As I see it, logical laws are different from empirical regularities. Many of our empirical predictions come true, but some of them don't, and in any case it's not hard to imagine any particular empirical prediction turning out false. I predict that the chair I'm now sitting in won't levitate before I finish answering your question, but it's easy for me to imagine being wrong in that prediction. Indeed, I can even imagine that universal gravitation stops working in the way we've become used to.

But what would it be to suppose that the laws of logic stop working? Would it be to suppose that the laws of logic stop working and continue to work exactly as they always have? If yes, why? If no, why not? (Presumably not because the laws of logic would prevent it!) So I'm not sure it's possible to entertain the supposition that the laws of logic stop working. Indeed, I'm not sure that there's any such supposition in the first place. In my view, the question "What makes us so confident that it will never be the case that the laws of logic stop working?" is on a par with the question "What makes us so confident that it will never be the case that @#$%^&*?" Neither question raises a comprehensible challenge.

(The chair didn't levitate, just by the way.)