Monday, October 11, 2021

Logic is a Contingent Attribute of the Cognition of Man

 

"The possession of self-conscious rationality, a possession belonging to us, to our contemporary world, has not been gained suddenly nor has it grown merely out of the soil of the present. On the contrary, it is essentially an inheritance and, more precisely, the result of labour, the labour of all the preceding generations of the human race." Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy pg.9, translated by T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press 1985  

 

 Logic has a history, a point at which it came into existence; it will also have an extinction.

 

"Human knowledge is a historical phenomena -- accumulated over generations and fixed in language which is intimately bound up with thought..." Select Articles from the 'Filosokskaja Enciklopedija,' Dialectic of the Cognitive Process, Sovietica vol.37 p.19, D. Reidel Publishing Company 1975

Logic, as a tool, is simply man's way of navigating the universe. That logic is contingent doesn't imply the negation of its value. This is a common philosophical mistake, similar to the nihilistic reasoning found in Christianity, where the theologian posits absolute negativity in the absence of the validation of supernatural or universal premises.  

Those who are bogged down by the question of logic's universal status have stopped making use of logic and are merely playing irrelevant, abstract games with it. The thinker who is stuck in this mode of thought must be careful, lest he mistakenly assign all of phonetics and all of linguistics to the realm of logic. Everything that falls into the category of speech or symbol is not necessarily logic; it is an error to attempt to assign every phonetic or symbolic utterance to the domain of logic.

The bottom line is that the ability to make use of logic requires cognitive capacity, logic is contingent. (It is also accurate to say that the quality of our biology is contingent on a quality of logic). The problem arises when the thinker tries to posit the error of a non-contingent logic, a kind of eternal logic inherent in the universe.

Logic, in its most material form, is a collective historic development/ is the result of component parts of the human brain working in unison to achieve the ability of abstract concepts (to make use of symbols and their presuppositions). The quality and ability of these concepts hinge on vital attributes supplied by the brain. The point at which logic shapes biology is the point where logic directs man on 'how to' cultivate the material components that supply these attributes (what is better known as developmental neurobiology). However, one cannot use this premise to justify the error of a supernatural logic. Logic had a beginning just like it will have an end, further, the idea that our present notions of logic exemplify the highest levels of "advanced intelligence," can only be a delusion of man. If life and logic are allowed to progress, if they are not thwarted by war and the deterioration of environment, the highest forms of technology we now possess (and that's what logic is, a linguistic technology) will be overshadowed, and those who hold the present form of logic up as a God, will be known in history as the ignorant subjects of a dark age.

Logic has a high value to man, but this doesn't make it eternal or universal. Logic is not a force of nature but an emergent property that derives from material components specific to the biology of man. Without these components logic would not exist, just like cakes and ice cream would not exist. These specific forms have come into being through the unique attributes which make up man, attributes which have been shaped by a largely, unconscious, dialectical process. When the components that make up man vanish from the universe, it is altogether conceivable that logic and cakes will also vanish from the universe. This is not to say that this process could not be replicated again in the universe, pending the right conditions, it is merely to clarify the contingent and corporeal nature of this thing we call logic.

Mankind is reaching a new stage where he is now, more than ever, capable of consciously using logic to direct the qualitative outcome of his biology. 

 

-

-