What use of logic?

In case reader would still be perplexed after all the pages as to what use logic is, Wolff kindly considers at the very end of Latin logic how logic can help one also in every-day life. In particular Wolff is speaking of artificial logic, as he has no doubt that everyone concurs that natural logic or the natural capacities of knowledge seeking are quite useful. In fact, advantages of artificial logic lie mostly in the refinement of these natural capacities: we can more easily detect erroneous thought patterns by knowing just few tricks of trade.

Still, the main point of application for logic is academic life, which Wolff divides into three broad subfields. Firstly, a learned person is in business of searching truths – this task has been covered by the majority of Wolff's logic. Secondly, a learned person must engage herself with books – she must write them, but also read and evaluate them. We covered this part of academic life in the previous blog text.

The final field where a learned person can apply logic is then interaction with other people. She must be able to demonstrate what she claims to be true or at least make it sound convincing. She must also refute views she finds false and she must be able to defend her own position from refutations of other learned people. All these tasks use essentially similar rules of logic, just applied at different stages – indeed, best defense of one's viewpoint is just demonstration of its truth.

The work of demonstrating, refuting and defending overlaps somewhat with the publication of books, as most of scholarly discussion happens through text. Yet, there are places where a learned person must come to actual contact with other people. This is especially true of public debates, part of education of a learned person, in which one has to defend a view, possibly even such which the defender doesn't really endorse. Art of disputation is then for Wolff nothing else but application of the arts of demonstrating, refuting and defending – there is no place for rhetorical niceties in Wolff's idea of disputation.

If disputation is two-directional interaction, teaching Wolff sees more as unidirectional. In fact, Wolff's philosophy of education is rather meager: all one needs to do is to take care that students understand the definitions and axioms and then it is just simple application of the rules of demonstration in the correct Euclidean order.

Here finally ends the tale of Wolff's logic. Next time, I shall finally move on to the next generation of the critics of Wolffian philosophy.

Natural logicians

Wolff defines logic as the discipline for guiding cognition to truth. That is, for Wolff logic is not just a canon or rule book for separating clear falsities from possible truths, but an organon or methodology for finding truths. Now, Wolff notes that such a discipline or science should properly be called an artificial logic and distinguishes it from what he calls natural logic. Such a natural logic might be an innate capacity for searching truths, but it might also be learned through education, like rules of thumb for solving some mathematical problems, just as long as we are still unclear about why such rules actually work.

Natural logic means for Wolff then just the usual workings of cognition, and its proper place of discussion would be psychology, on which logic then depends on. Natural logic forms in Wolff a process, stages of which are familiar already from Wolff's German writings and in which we begin with sensations or perceptions (as I've noticed before, Wolff does not distinguish these carefully). Some of the sensations are somehow connected to things that are external to the consciousness and that appear to make impressions on sense organs. Yet, Wolff also admits the existence of an inner sense, by which we come to know ourselves.

The sensations or perceptions form then the starting point of cognition for Wolff, although they are also its most rudimentary phase. While perceptions can only refer to things that are actually present, imagination helps us to e.g. recollect images of absent things that we have seen previously. Both perceived and imagined things can then be concentrated on and apprehended. Such an act of apprehension requires that we use the perception or the imagination as a representation of the real thing.

Suffice to say, this representation is what Wolff called in German Begriff (a concept), while in Latin version he uses words like Notio and Idea, which reveals the clear Lockean influences. While Kant was later to disparage Wolff for intellectualising appearances, he was actually doing quite the opposite and made at least some concepts into mental pictures. Thus, the image of the rose in front of me or of the one I remember seeing are all concepts for Wolff. True, we can also refer to these images and individuals represented with them by words, but this is secondary. Note that all the concepts at this point concern only individuals, since universalities cannot be perceived or imagined as such.

The mental images of past and present things can then be compared with one another. These comparisons might immediately instigate in us an awareness of e.g. certain similarities between different things. This awareness is the first instance of judgements, and like concepts, they have their own linguistic counterpart in propositions. Furthermore, it is through such judgements that universal concepts come to existence – when we think of whiteness and if we are not just thinking about the word ”white”, we must be thinking about several white things and the recognition of their similarity.

From judgements of similitude we form then notions of genera of things, which are nothing apart from the things and their similitude and the words we use for designating these spurious entities – we thus see Wolff here advocating nominalism. In addition to similarities, we also intuitively note dissimilarities between things and can thus divide genera into different species. Finally, we can extend the set of true judgements we can make by using our intuitive judgements as a basis on which we can build complex demonstrations.

Now, if all of this is natural logic, what task is then left for artificial logic anymore? That is, if one can do all this by instinct or at least learn it by following how others use their reason, why should we need an independent science of reasoning? Wolff himself doesn't consider the problem, but Hegel will have a convincing answer in an analogy. Surely our digestion, muscles etc. work by themselves, but we can still profit from learning anatomy and physiology, because we can then eat in a healthy manner, exercise properly etc. Similarly, we surely do think naturally, but logic teaches us how to think well.

Next time I shall say something about Wolff's classification of concepts.