Footnotes to Formal Logic (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from Footnotes to Formal Logic

The psychologist, on the one hand, and the metaphysician and the epistemologist, on the other, have crowded our present day discussions in the field of pure logic into a very narrow and uncomfortable position. No sooner does the logician raise the question as to the origin and nature of the thinking process, than the psychologist warns him that he is trespassing in fields not his. Especially is this true when we venture to discuss such questions as the process whereby judgment develops into inference or is depressed into conception. This we are told is not logic, hut genetic psychology. On the other hand, when the logician raises the question as to the nature of knowledge in general, he is again rebuked for passing into the domain of metaphysics, epistemology or ontology. It has been said that if the logician should accept these restrictions which his neighbors have imposed upon his field, there would be little left of logic, except a mere collection of misleading formulae coupled with a little elementary grammar.

I think the situation is not quite so desperate as this, and I hope in some small measure in these studies to justify the present tendency to widen the field of logic. When we attempt to define the nature and scope of logic, or of any other of the philosophical sciences, we find our inquiries passing by imperceptible steps from one field to another until presently each subject in turn claims to be the whole of philosophy. I believe it to be a mistake to divorce logic - even for educational purposes - from the other philosophical sciences. I do not see how it is possible to answer the questions that are more than ever today besetting logical doctrine until we have first settled some of the fundamental problems of philosophy.

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