computerphys said:
I find this fuzziness and vagueness quite useful to describe mind states.
So do I. Indeed, I was doing mind science and it was because a machine-style logic was clearly not up to the task of modelling the mind that I eventually came across this organic, developmental approach to logic.
Note the way Peirce reverses the usual approach to logic. He started with a description of how minds develop ideas (semiosis) and then generalised it to a description of how even universes develop (so instead of the universe developing laws, he talks about it developing habits - he uses psychological terms. Which is justified by the cogito - starting explanation from what we can be most sure about).
computerphys said:
I mean, everybody under any circumstances would end up with the same logical system than Aristotle's. Did every human civilization share always the same logical system? If it is really universal, there should be a good reason for that. Probably it is the most basic possible set of self-compatible rules or something like that. In that case, mathematics would also be universal, isn't it?
If you check all major early philosophy, then you find that they have a similar organic approach (a vagueness that dichotomises and becomes hierarchically organised). So you see in the first greek metaphysics, and also Buddhist and Taoist philosophy.
For instance, Chris Lofting has looked at a dichotomising logic in the I Ching (which is not just some fortune telling nonsense) http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/
But there are "two logics" even in the human mind.
The organic logic is how brains themselves are organised. The brain is a bunch of dichotomies leading to hierarchies. To explain the brain, we talk about attention vs habits, the ventral "what" or object recognition stream vs the dorsal "where" or spatial awareness stream, the left hemisphere focal style of processing vs the right hemisphere contextual style of processing, dopamine endogenous goal-directed attention vs norepinephrine exogenous vigilant attention...and so on and on.
But then humans also have speech. And this is based on a more machine like logic. Instead of holistic causality, there is a step by step, chain of cause and effect, style causality.
All languages are based on the same logical structure - subject-verb-object, a tale of who did what to whom. The serial nature of the speech act forces us to break the wholeness of the world up into an utterance which is based solely on effective cause (only one of Aristotle's four causes). If this, then that.
So you have an interesting situation. Our minds work organically and yet the habit of speech also means that we are used to analysing reality in mechanical terms.
The holistic view of the world is the truer - seeing the world as a whole, a web of self-organising interactions.
But the mechanical approach, while more constrained (employing only efficient cause), has its own special power because it is combinatorial and open-ended. The subject-verb-object template of a sentence is a logical statement, and it can be used to state something false as well as true.
A holistic impression of the world is restricted to being true because it is self-constraining. It does not have the freedom to be false as a sum over a collection of interactions has only one outcome, one equilibrium balance. But a logical statement is an isolate act and so can make a leap, a postulate, hypothesis or abduction, in any direction. I can say the moon is made of green cheese - the seven words are an effortless assertion. Whereas it would be very hard for me to gain an impression the moon is made of green cheese unless it actually was.
So anyway, the human mind does in fact employ two logics - the holistic logic of a mind that perceives the whole of the world about it, and then the verbal logic which humans employ to reach beyond this immediate, constrained, state of experiencing to construct a realm of the postulated, the hypothetical.
One logic has become "logic" for most people. A logic based solely on efficient cause (if this, then that). A logic in which various formal constraints (the principle of the excluded third, the principle of contradiction) are taken as granted.
But people have forgotten about (or never actually understood) that there is also then the larger embedding logic of holism, the way the mind understands reality as a whole. And this should now itself be a focus for formalisation. We can construct a model of organic logic. Aristotle indeed did this - he was separating the two kinds of logic more clearly. Peirce took the project up again in modern times. In the 1960s and 1970s, science got quite close to doing so again with systems science, hierarchy theory, ecology.
The problem is that over the past 40 years, we have had the computer revolution, the information theoretic age. Machine logic has become so culturally dominant that organic approaches are these days treated as some kind of intellectual heresy. There is only now the machine approach - efficient cause. Holism is not even tolerated.
Again, these two logics are in fact both useful. Indeed, they are complementary, they are "part of each other".
But the proper relationship is {organic {mechanical}} and not mechanical => organic.
That is, the presumption of those who think that everything can be reduced to efficient cause, machine logic, is that anything organic, anything complex, can be constructed. So we have people trying to build artificial intelligence, artificial life, using mechanical principles. It is presumed that the organic can always be "built". And so the mechanical is what is foundational.
But I am arguing that the organic is the whole story, the mechanical is the local story. The organic is Aristotle's four causes, the mechanical is just his efficient cause. So if we are relating to two logics, one is the subset of the larger.
{final, formal and material cause {efficient cause}}
). So just read any post where I start talking about dichotomies that lead to hierarchies.
