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There seems to be a distinction between studying logic mathematically and studying it philosophically and, in practice, it is reasonably clear which framework one is using when one studies logic.

I've used this distinction in the past to try to defend using very strong theories (classical FOL + ZFC) to analyze simple ones (that they arguably depend on) like propositional calculus by claiming that the apparent conceptual circularity is a philosophical concern and is not a mathematical concern. Now I'm wondering whether this position is wrong or naive.

I'm wondering whether this position (i.e. there is an important/meaningful distinction in practice between studying logic mathematically and studying logic philosophically) has a name and whether any philosophers have described, defended, or rebutted it specifically.


When you study logic mathematically, you assume ordinary mathematical reasoning in the background (which in practice usually means classical logic and ZFC or NBG or another mainstream set theory), and aren't particularly concerned about the meaning of the deductive system you're working with. You're just analyzing it as a mathematical object. Also, more to the point, when studying logic mathematically one is not bothered by conceptual circularity, such as using natural numbers at the meta-level even though logic is conceptually prior to natural numbers.

Studying logic philosophically would include questions that are not specifically about analyzing the behavior of a logical system, using a possibly-formalized background theory like ZFC or ordinary mathematics.

Here are some questions that I think illustrate the concept of investigating a logic philosophically. Many of them are extremely naive, but that's just because I made them up instead of grabbing them from somewhere.

  • How well does some deductive system capture inferences that are valid in natural language?
  • What are the ontological commitments of a deductive system (such as plural logic or second-order logic)?
  • What's the right way to measure how "good" a logic system is?
  • Is there one true logic?
  • Is logical pluralism a coherent position?
  • What, if anything, is the relationship between logic and truth?
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    For zero ontological commitments of math see Elaine Landry, who says axioms come from treating them as-if they were true, no ontological commitments. Russell said math and logic first principles come from abductive reasoning, which is a step closer to ontological commitments. Russell believed abductive reasoning is still important in coming up with new axioms, which we would like to have to solve things like the continuum hypothesis. He also believed math was an extension of logic. Their foundations are philosophical (abductive).
    – J Kusin
    Commented Jan 5, 2022 at 3:21
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    I am afraid some of your distinctions are not salient. Studies in mathematical logic do not assume ZFC, or even classical logic, nor is one necessarily bothered by "circularity" in philosophical studies of logic, it is inevitable in foundations. That logic is "prior" to numbers is very disputable, for example. The difference is not so much in the topics studied as in the methods and approaches used. Mathematicians use formalism and technical arguments, philosophers take account of technical results, but reason informally on issues where formalization is either controversial or elusive.
    – Conifold
    Commented Jan 5, 2022 at 9:02
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    And interesting question, but I doubt your premise--that there is some sort of circularity. Natural numbers pre-exist logic by thousands of years, so the claim that logic is conceptually prior to natural numbers, if it means anything at all, can't mean that you need logic to use natural numbers. Furthermore, no one needed logic to be analyzed mathematically before they knew it was correct. I suspect that you are confusing analysis with justification. Logic is used to analyse natural numbers, not justify them. Mathematical logic is used to analyse logic, not justify it. Commented Jan 5, 2022 at 14:49
  • If it is accepted that Mathematics is part of Logic, and Logic is part of Philosophy, a philosophical approach to Logic is necessarily synthetic (a part interacting with other disciplines, synthesized in Philosophy), and a mathematical approach to Logic is analytic (a set of parts with multiple interactions with other parts of mathematics).
    – RodolfoAP
    Commented Jan 6, 2022 at 11:57
  • @GregoryNisbet I don't think that there is any such a thing as studying logic mathematically or philosophically. The only meaningful way you can study logic is to take into account whatever empirical facts about logic are available and reason logically. You could do that whether your are a philosopher, a mathematician or a plumber. I don't see anyone really doing this, though, so as far as I understand, nobody is really studying logic at all, except in a very limited way people working on the theory of arguments. Commented Jan 6, 2022 at 12:09

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To contrast "studying logic mathematically" with "studying logic philosophically" is perhaps not looking at the issue quite straight. Logic overlaps with mathematics in a two-way fashion. We can use mathematical methods to make logic more rigorous, and we can use logic to study the foundations of mathematics. These activities are inevitably circular, though that doesn't make them useless. But equally, it doesn't create a dichotomy in how one studies logic, or in how one uses logic. Logic is logic, however mathematical or not one chooses to make it.

In the same way that there is a branch of philosophy concerned with the philosophy of mathematics, there is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the philosophy of logic. Many of your bulleted questions are fundamental questions in this domain. What is logic all about? If there are logical truths, what are they true of? What exactly is logical consequence and validity? How do we have knowledge of logic? Is logic in need of some kind of justification or foundation? If so, how can we provide one? Why are there lots of logics? Is only one correct, and if so, which one? Is logic normative, and if so in what way? How does logic connect to related subjects such as computation, reasoning, linguistics and epistemology?

There is a substantial literature on the philosophy of logic, and answering your questions would require a lengthy essay for each. To address a few points:

How a formal system relates to and captures valid inferences in natural language, and how well it does so, is always a compromise between a number of conflicting desiderata. We want a logic to be simple, consistent, accurate, expressive, general, practical, obvious, computable, and to make a good fit with other disciplines where it is put to use. It is impossible to do all these things, so all our systems of logic are trade-offs. The fact that first order classical logic is so ubiquitous is an indicator that it does a pretty good job, but it still has many limitations.

Logical pluralism has strong and weak versions. In its weak form, we may allow that different logics can coexist because they are concerned with a different modality, or a different semantic property. E.g. that classical validity is concerned with perserving truth, while intuitionistic logic is concerned with warranted assertability, or relevance logic with channels of information. In its stronger form, pluralists accept that distinct logics can coexist for a single domain, modality, or semantics.

Fundamentally, logic is concerned with the relation of logical consequence. But logicians cannot agree on what this is. There are about a dozen competing accounts of logical consequence, or of what it is that makes a valid argument valid.

Here is a list of some books on the philosophy of logic:

  • Beall and Restall. Logical Pluralism.
  • Cohnitz and Estrada-Gonzalez. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic.
  • John Etchemendy. The Concept of Logical Consequence.
  • Susan Haack. Philosophy of Logics.
  • Matthew McKeon. The Concept of Logical Consequence.
  • W.V. Quine. Philosophy of Logic.
  • Stephen Read. Thinking about Logic.
  • Ian Rumfitt. Boundary Stones of Thought.
  • Penelope Rush. The Metaphysics of Logic.
  • Graham Priest. Doubt Truth to be a Liar.
  • Stewart Shapiro. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
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There are multiple ways of answering this question that would appease different schools of thought about the metaphysical nature of logic, mathematics, reality, and cognition. This concretizes itself into different kinds of ansatz of inquiry, and ultimately 'logic' stratifies into distinct concepts.

Now, pushing the wild gardens of philosophy to the side for a bit, tracking down 'logic' in mathematics is not as easy as it might seem from how unambiguous the discipline might look from the outside. Taking the axiomatic approach to maths, as, e.g., Hofstadter does in GEB, will lead you to say that logic in maths are the rules we agree on to move from one ontologically-True theorem to an other, then, logic's entire role is to effectively (re-)assure us that the accessible is True and that our construction is self-consistent.

In practice this is more complicated, because mathematics is not just the polished product of decades research and refinement. Mathematical research necessitates the important step of a "non-Logical" ontogenesis before it can move on embedding and refining the logical steps of a theory: theorists will first apply and transpose intuitions to generate (define) concepts objects that seem interesting (not yet even truth-apt), and only subsequently embed them in a body of work in which the concepts become well(-enough)-defined to be subjected to logical analysis. That is to say, not all mathematics (or the mathematical process) is (or, imo, should be) constructivist, and non-constructivist maths follows rules of logic that are much more about what the community finds to be a good(-enough) argument than closely laying out every logical steps building up to a certain theorem; logic leaks into a distributed process happening in the emergent collective intelligence of the research community, and that is much more difficult to pin down. In short: logic in mathematics is not in general studied per-se, it is something one does, a nebulous set of (sometimes surprisingly implicit) rules that one has to follow for their results to be recognized.

If the question is more specifically about the study of logic as a branch of mathematics, then we can start thinking about meta-mathematics, or the sets of theorems (like Godel's) that specifically use maths to talk about what maths can or cannot do, and that practice is very different from philosophy, because it is fully embedded in the mathematical ontic, and thus 'results' are not claimed (or required) to have any correspondence with colloquial concepts.

In turn, 'philosophy' is very varied. Some people studying logic will in effect only care about Capital 'L' Logic as is often studied in the context of stereotypical analytical philosophy. But logic, reason, and by extension cognition and language, have been the focus of many non-analytical philosophers, like, say, Derrida, who definitely both uses and studies forms of logic pretty rigorously.

That said, the analytical approach to the study of logic can seem at first sight pretty close to maths, as any enthusiastic literary-minded student will grumble after taking a course such as 'Introduction to Epistemology' where they were subjected to high-school math PTSD after wrangling with Bayes' rule and probabilistic characterizations of irrationality for a semester.

Starting with the similarities, logic will be very axiomatic in this kind of analytical philosophy as well, e.g. in epistemology they will extract 'axioms' of probability and basic rules of algebraic manipulation to study belief-updating. Additionally, both disciplines will subsume predicate logic, with varying levels of rigour in different bodies of work. But there are differences. First, Logic in analytical philosophy has historically been motivated as a way to refine thought. For instance, Stalnaker in Inquiry tries to pin down concepts of intentionality and counterfactuals in a self-consistent analytical system. In so doing he follows the same formula as mathematicians: he will use the tools and ansatzs of logic considered useful in analytical philosophy to make ontologically foreign concepts such as 'intentionality' consistent with the rest of the formulation. The difference is that philosophy (of any kind) usually needs to claim to be directly relevant to the human experience, not unwieldingly hidden behind layers and layers of abstraction as is often the case in maths.

Simplifying a bit, maths creates its own world and aims to explore every corner regardless of relevance with curiosity, whereas philosophy stubbornly tries to explain the nature of our world as we perceive it, and these are two very different endeavours.

That said, I do believe that there are times where the two disciplines find unlikely common grounds. A very interesting example is how one can cast Hegel's logic, along with Aufhebung and the like, into a Category Theory framework (see e.g. A. Prahauser, 2022), which is very mathematical. Or, like how Derrida's post-structuralism has ties to connectionists views of language in linguistics which has been mathematically formalized as presheaves in a certain co-occurrence category through Yoneda embeddings, essentially representing the same conception of meaning with different tools and vocabulary.

To end, I don't believe there is one form of logic that can be subjected to restrictive correspondence, neither in mathematics nor in philosophy. The two have different goals and live in quite different language games, and thus have pretty idiosyncratic implicit and explicit conceptions of logic. But I do believe that our intuitions about logic is regulated by our colloquial understanding of it, and that can create unlikely correspondences between otherwise convoluted and idiosyncratic constructions, a form of convergent evolution of ideas.

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I’ve found that a surprising number of mathematicians are not that interested in the philosophy of mathematics. I used to think that mathematics was “the religion of formalism”, but have found that many mathematicians actually believe formalism has its limits. I know of some very estimable mathematicians who do not think you can succeed in “getting to the bottom of things” in terms of a way to ground all of mathematics in first principles (roughly). One reason is that any formal system can itself be formalized by a meta-language it is defined in. These mathematician think that the current computerization of mathematics is another iteration of the false hope for perfect systematicity in mathematics.

An operational definition of logic that I find myself returning to is “the study of valid reasoning”. This is a common one, for example used in the introduction to Mendelson’s “Mathematical Logic”. Since mathematicians are, rather oddly, in my experience, not actually plagued with worry about if their axioms have perfect justification, “mathematical logic”, to an extent, is better defined as “the mathematics that emerged from logic”, rather than “logic made mathematical”, even though both are actually accurate. Mathematical studies often spring from specific applied contexts - even the rate of change of population growth of a species, or the formations birds form when they fly, can lead to new mathematical questions which eventually get formalized and then are no longer really about the original biological contexts. I agree with the spirit of Speakpigeon’s deleted answer that to an extent, sometimes people working in mathematical logic have lost interest in the original aim of “valid reasoning”, and are just studying the mathematical and structural properties of various formal systems which came from logic, and can still be applied to logic nonetheless.

This is not true for everyone. I think highly of philosophical logicians who are also mathematical, like Quine, Kripke, Russell, Church and many others. In some ways, the original question of understanding the conceptual nature of things like “justification, belief, truth”, etc., is given a very rich treatment by people outside of the strictly mathematical approach - people like Wittgenstein and many others, including people outside of analytic philosophy.

I think a number of contemporary mathematicians think of mathematics in more heuristic terms - they think that even if you burrow down to the foundations of a proof system and realize not everything is justified, but much of it assumed, it isn’t a problem because the axioms are ultimately meant to simply bolster some inherent truths that humans are not particularly worried about, like that 1+1=2. This viewpoint indicates that formal logic is actually more of an approximation to truth - by codifying whatever essential observations you can, you can devise a “proof system” which seems reliable, but it doesn’t actually have the perfect salvation from uncertainty that someone might think it’s supposed to.

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    +1 Now in this answer, you certainly make explicit the tension between grounding formal systems in cognition and natural language semantics, and the use of formal systems as specialized mechanisms to solve technical and syntactical problems of a generally epistemological nature often without any explicit understanding of the ontological, epistemological, or metaphysical first principles in play.
    – J D
    Commented Aug 18 at 17:37
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I find Gurdjieff's 3-fold classification of knowledge into philosophy, theory and practice useful. A more modern version would be philosophy, science, tech/engineering.

  • Technology/engineering practice is understanding at our level, as how to more than what is
  • Science/theory is in terms of laws, the more quantitative, the better
  • Philosophy is an exploration of all possibilities

Philosophy is the most broad and most useless (in the utilitarian sense) Technology/engineering is fundamentally about doing things but its scope is most narrow — your car mechanic is unlikely to be useful for your mobile. And vice versa. Science is the connecting link.

I guess, to some extent the same kind of 3 fold levels can be foisted (upto a point) on math

Knowledge Math
Tech Calculus
Science Algebra/geometry/Analysis/Number theory
Philosophy ???

The interesting question is how to fill in the ???.

A first trivial approx is to say Logic.

This does not work

  • Trivially because predicate palculus is a calculus
  • More significantly digital logic is very much engineering

So my next approximation is set theory. But this too is unsatisfactory because there are significant mathematicians eg. Brouwer who reject set theory as ill founded.

My most preferred fill of the ??? would be Category Theory, *Model theory, Meta-mathematics. Note that MacLane, the founder of Category Theory was unambiguously influenced by Kant and his categories. Likewise Model Theory is the attempt to map math-syntax to "reality" and in that sense is very on the sleeves philosophical. Meta-mathematics is of course disguised philosophy, and a very thin disguise at that!

So to address your question:

The logic that the formalists do is geared towards the earlier rows of the table whereas the logic that the philosophers would be interested in are towards the latter rows.

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  • Nice. So, manipulating logical syntax, understanding logical syntax semantically, and manipulating semantics to understand logic itself. That seems a pretty reasonable way to carve up reality at the joints. :D
    – J D
    Commented Aug 19 at 19:40
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    Nice @JD. Except that I would not use the second instance of "manipulating". I would say: Manipulating--technology; understanding--philosophy; linking manipulation to understanding--science. The Greeks too had their own version of these — episteme, techne, phronesis, nous etc. But I hesitate to throw around words that I dont have a strong feeling for
    – Rushi
    Commented Aug 20 at 1:44
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Thought I might throw my 2 cents into this bag.

The jewel in the crown for logic is math.

I always wondered why we weren't taught logic, even the bare basics, in high school. Turns out we were. Old timer here so we had to learn (Euclid's) geometry. Logic = Math, at least those who developed the curriculum back then thought so.

Furthermore ...

Mathematics is inconsitency-intolerant; we can't have a contradiction in math (re: infinity, etc.). Philosophy on the other hand has developed inconsistency-tolerant logics like paraconsistent logic, aka Brazilian logic. Coincidentally, the inspiration for paraconsistent logics came from Euclid's 5th postulate (nonEuclidean geometries).

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