HISTORY OF LOGIC
MBALEWE MMESOMA IKENNA ARCHITECTURE
23/1472
THE HISTORY OF LOGIC
The history of logic documents the development of logic as it occurs in various
cultures and traditions in history. While many cultures have employed intricate systems
of reasoning, logic as an explicit analysis of the methods of reasoning received sustained
development originally only in three traditions: China, India and Greece. Although exact
dates are uncertain, especially in the case of India, it is possible that logic emerged in all
three societies in the fourth century B.C.E. The notions of systems of
reasoning and logic, however, are sufficiently imprecise that various answers to the
questions of what they are and how they are to be understood have been given. The
formally sophisticated treatment of modern logic descends from the Greek tradition, but
comes not wholly through Europe, but instead comes from the transmission of Aristotelian
logic and commentary upon it by Islamic philosophers to logicians in Medieval Europe.
In China, a contemporary of Confucius, Mozi, "Master Mo," is credited with founding the
Mohist school, whose canons dealt with issues relating to valid inference and the
conditions of correct conclusions. In particular, one of the schools that grew out
of Mohism, the Logicians, are credited by some scholars for their early investigation
of formal logic. Unfortunately, due to the harsh rule of Legalism in the subsequent Qin
Dynasty, this line of investigation disappeared in China until the introduction of Indian
philosophy by Buddhists.
At least one commentator has noted that Chinese logic seems to be based on
coherence and analogy, usually consisting of a series of picturesque metaphors,
parables, and anecdotes strung together to illustrate certain main ideas. This results in
making Chinese philosophy more poetic than logical, at least as logic is understood in
Western thought. "Chinese thought tries to bring emotional rather than intellectual
conviction and its main appeal is to the heart rather than to the mind."
(Hansen, "Language and Logic in Ancient China")
Logic in India
Two of the six Indian schools of thought deal with logic: Nyaya and Vaisheshika. The
Nyaya Sutras of Aksapada Gautama constitute the core texts of the Nyaya school, one of
the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy. This realist-materialist, school worked out a
rigid five-member schema of inference involving an initial premise, a reason, an example,
an application and a conclusion.
The idealist Buddhist philosophy became the chief opponent to the
Naiyayikas. Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika "Middle Way" developed an
analysis known as the "catuskoti" or tetralemma. This four-cornered argumentation
systematically examined and rejected the affirmation of a proposition, its denial, the joint
affirmation and denial, and finally, the rejection of its affirmation and denial. But it was with
Dignaga and his successor Dharmakirti that Buddhist logic reached its height. Their
analysis centered on the definition of necessary logical entailment, "vyapti," also known as
invariable concomitance or pervasion. To this end a doctrine known as "apoha" or
differentiation was developed. This involved what might be called inclusion and exclusion
of defining properties. The difficulties involved in this enterprise, in part, stimulated the
neo-scholastic school of Navya-Nyaya, which introduced a formal analysis of inference in
the sixteenth century.
Logic in Greece
In Greece, two main competing logical traditions emerged. Stoic logic traced its roots
back to Euclid of Megara (c. 430 - c. 360 B.C.E.), a pupil of Socrates, and with its
concentration on propositional logic was perhaps closer to modern logic. The Megarians
were interested in puzzles, and studied modality and conditionals. The Stoics used
numbers as variables for replacing whole propositions. The most important Stoic logician
was Chrysippus (c. 279 - 206 B.C.E.), who discussed five basic or valid inference
schemata, and from them derived or proved many other valid inference schemata.
There was also a Medieval tradition that held that the Greek philosopher
Parmenides, in fifth century B.C.E., invented logic while living on a rock in Egypt. In any
case, his disciple, Zeno of Elea did produce many supposedly logical arguments, known
as Zeno's paradoxes. These were given in support of Parmenides' philosophy—a
philosophy that denied motion and multiplicity—and purported to show that a non-
Parmenidean view leads to absurdity. This method of proving something by assuming its
alternative and showing that this assumption leads to absurdity is known as reduction ad
absurdum and Zeno's use of it suggests that he knew of the general pattern of such
argument. Zeno's paradoxes do, however, all contain fatal mistakes, but showing what the
mistakes are often required waiting until much later developments in logic and
mathematical logic.
The Greek tradition that survived to influence later cultures, however, was the
Peripatetic tradition which originated in Aristotle's collection of works known as the
"Organon" or instrument, the first systematic Greek work on logic. In fact, Aristotle is often
called the first great logician. Although he did not use these terms himself, Aristotle
introduced the formal study of what is now known as formal logic, that is; logic that is
concerned with the form, not the content, of statements or propositions, and the
relationships that exist between different statements on the basis of their form—some
statements being accepted (as premises), other statement(s) follow (as conclusion(s))
from those accepted statements because of their form.
Aristotle held that a proposition involves two terms, a subject and a predicate.
Propositions can be universal ("all," "no") or particular ("some"), and affirmative or
negative. Aristotle's formal logic was confined to examination of syllogisms, which consist
of three propositions. The first two are the premises, and must share only one term. The
third proposition is the conclusion, which contains the two terms that are not shared by
the premises. Aristotle also investigated how the common term (shared by the two
premises) can occur and the effects of its different ways of occurring. Aristotle's work on
syllogisms bears interesting comparison with the Indian schema of inference and the less
rigid Chinese discussion.
Aristotle also formulated certain theses about logic (sometimes called metalogical
principles): The Law of Noncontradiction, the Principle of the Excluded Middle, and the
Law of Bivalence. In addition he investigated some of what are now known as informal
fallacies, fallacies that occur for some reason other than the form of the argument, such
as argumetum ad hominem, and appeal to the crowd.
Aristotle's successor as head of his school, Theophrastus of Eresus (c. 371 - c.
286 B.C.E.), carried on Aristotle's investigations of logic and added to them.
Through Latin in Western Europe, and disparate languages more to the East, such
as Arabic, Armenian and Georgian, the Aristotelian tradition was considered to codify pre-
eminently the laws of reasoning. It was only in the nineteenth century that this viewpoint
changed; it has been suggested by a few commentators that this change may have been
facilitated by an acquaintance with the classical literature of India and deeper knowledge
of China.
Except for what was done in the Arabic world, there was little work in logic between
that of Boethius (480 - 524 or 525 C.E.) and Peter Abelard (1079-1142) in the twelfth
century.
Logic in Islamic philosophy
After Muhammed's death, Islamic law placed importance on formulating standards
of argument, which gave rise to a novel approach to argumentation in Kalam, but this
approach was displaced by ideas from Greek philosophy with the rise of the Mutazilite
philosophers, who valued highly Aristotle's Organon. The work of Greek-influenced
Islamic philosophers was crucial in the reception of Greek logic in medieval Europe, and
the commentaries on the Organon by Averroes played a central role in the subsequent
flowering of medieval European logic.
Despite the logical sophistication of Al-Ghazali, the rise of the Asharite school slowly
suffocated original work on logic in the Islamic world.
Medieval Logic
Medieval Logic (also known as Scholastic Logic) generally means the form of
Aristotelian logic developed in medieval Occident throughout the period c. 1200-1600.
The first great medieval logician was Peter Abelard, who wrote commentaries on
Aristotle's work on logic. Among other things, Abelard wrote on the role of the copula in
categorical propositions ("all" or "none"), the effects of placing the negation sign in
different positions, modal notions such as "possible," and conditional propositions (if___
then … ).
During the medieval period mnemonic names were created for the valid moods of the
syllogism that had been discussed in Aristotle's Prior Analytics. Two of those moods were
BARBARA, in which the three propositions of the syllogism consist entirely of universal
affirmatives, and CELARENT, in which one premise is a universal negative, the other a
universal affirmative, and the conclusion is a universal negative. Medieval logicians also
investigated modal logic.
Logic in the medieval period was developed through textbooks such as that by Peter
of Spain in the thirteenth century, but whose exact identity is unknown, who was the
author of a standard textbook on logic, the Tractatus which was well known in Europe for
many centuries. This tradition of medieval logic reached a high point in the fourteenth
century, with the works of William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) and Jean Buridan.
One feature was the development of Aristotelian logic through what is known as
Supposition Theory, a study of the semantics of the terms of the proposition, or theory of
reference (in general) and theory or personal reference. The last great works in this
tradition are the Logic of John Poinsot (1589-1644, known as John of St Thomas), and
the Metaphysical Disputations of Francisco Suarez (1548-1617).In the sixteenth century,
however, what we now know as logic was largely displaced by interest in and study
of dialectic. Thus the three works of Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Compendiaria
dialectics ratio (1520), Dialectics libri quattuor (1528), and Erotemata dialectics (1547)
each carried the term dialectics in its title, instead of logic, and the same was true of
works by Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) and the scholar known as the Portugese
Aristotle, Petrus Fonseca, S.J., whose Institutionum dialecticarum libri octo first appeared
in 1564.
In the eighteenth century, there was a return to the use of the term "logic." Christoph
Scheibler (1589-1653), known as the Protestant Suarez, published an encyclopedic
book Opus Logicum in Marburg, Germany, in 1633. Other books with the term "logic" in
their titles appeared, such as Logica Hamburgensis in 1638 from Joachim Jungius (1587-
1657), Logica vetus et nova (1654) by the German Cartesian Johannes Clauberg (1622-
1655), and some others. The most notable and important work of this era was the Port
Royal Logic.
Traditional Logic
What has become known as traditional logic generally means the textbook tradition that
begins with Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole's Logic, or the Art of Thinking, better known
as the Port-Royal Logic. Published in 1662, it was the most influential work on logic in
England until John Stuart Mill's System of Logic in 1825. The book presents a loosely
Cartesian doctrine (that the proposition is a combining of ideas rather than terms, for
example) within a framework that is broadly derived from Aristotelian and medieval term
logic. Between 1664 and 1700 there were eight editions, and the book had considerable
influence after that. It was frequently reprinted in English up to the end of the nineteenth
century.
The account of propositions that John Locke gave in the Essay is essentially that of
Port-Royal. "Verbal propositions, which are words, [are] the signs of our ideas, put
together or separated in affirmative or negative sentences. So that proposition consists in
the putting together or separating these signs, according as the things which they stand
for agree or disagree." (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV. 5. 6)
Works in this tradition include Isaac Watts' Logick: Or, the Right Use of
Reason (1725), Richard Whately's Logic (1826), and John Stuart Mill's A System of
Logic (1843), which was one of the last great works in that tradition.
The Transition to Modern Logic
The idea of a calculus of reasoning was cultivated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who
was the first to formulate the notion of a broadly applicable system of mathematical logic.
However, the relevant documents were not published until 1901 or remain unpublished to
the present day, and the current understanding of the power of Leibniz's discoveries did
not emerge until the 1980s. [See Lenzen's chapter in Gabbay and Woods (2004)].
John Venn 1834-1923, was a Cambridge logician who published three standard
texts in logic, The Logic of Chance 1866, Symbolic Logic 1881, and The Principles of
Empirical Logic 1889. Today he is remembered mostly for his logical diagrams, known
as Venn diagrams, used for representing syllogisms. He was not the originator of using
geometrical representations to illustrate syllogistic logic; Leibniz had often used such
methods. Venn became critical of the diagrams used in the nineteenth century, especially
those of logicians George Boole 1815-1864, and Augustus de Morgan 1806-1871. Boole
was the inventor of what is now known as Boolean algebra, which is the basis of all
modern computer arithmetic; he is regarded as being one of the founders of the field of
computer science, although computers did not exist in his day. De Morgan was an Indian-
born British mathematician and logician who formulated what are now known as De
Morgan's laws and was the first to introduce the term mathematical induction and make
rigorous the idea. Venn wrote the book Symbolic Logic to interpret and make his
corrections on Boole's work. Prior to publishing this book, Venn wrote a paper entitled "On
the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Prepositions and Reasonings"
introducing Venn diagrams. This paper was published in the Philosophical Magazine and
Journal of Science in July, 1880. In Symbollic Logic, Venn further elaborated on these
diagrams, and they became the most important part of his work.
In an 1885 article read by Giuseppe Peano, Ernst Schröder, and others, Charles
Sanders Peirce introduced the term second-order logic and provided us with much of our
modern logical notation, including prefixed symbols for universal and existential
quantification. Logicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were thus
more familiar with the Peirce-Schröder system of logic, although Frege is generally
recognized today as being the "Father of modern logic."
In Poland, under Jan Łukasiewicz (1878-1956) there was a variation on the mathematical
school: logic became the branch of mathematics that was to be brought within the
axiomatic methodology. Łukasiewicz worked on multi-valued logics; his three-valued
propositional calculus, introduced in 1917, was the first explicitly axiomatized non-
classical logical calculus. He is responsible for one of the most elegant axiomatizations of
classical propositional logic; it has just three axioms and is one of the most used
axiomatizations today.
The discovery of non-Euclidian geometry spurred mathematicians to consider
alternative interpretations of their mathematical languages and to consider metalogical
questions about their systems. Those metalogical or metamethematical questions
included those of the independence, consistency, categoricity, and completeness of
axiomatic systems.
This intensive work on metamathematical issues culminated in the work of Kurt
Gödel (1906-1978), a logician of the caliber of Aristotle and Frege. He proved a number of
important metamathematical statements, including his most famous, the incompleteness
theorem which shows that for axiomatizations of sufficient richness for arithmetic, there is
a sentence which is neither provable nor refutable within that axiomatic system.
Gödel was also one of the central figures in the study of computability. Others
included Alonzo Church (1903-1995), Alan Turing (1912-1954), and others. Church
proved that Peano arithmetic and first-order logic are undecidable. The latter result is
known as Church's theorem. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern
computer science. He provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm
and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing"
version of the Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has
either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine.
Mathematical logic has come to be a central part of contemporary analytic philosophy,
especially with the work of Willard Van Orman Quine, Saul Kripke, Donald Davidson, and
Michael Dummet. Some of the topics covered have been modal logic, tense logic, many-
valued logic, deontic logic, relevance logic, and non-standard logic.
Logic and Philosophy
The history of logic cannot be separated from general philosophy and the philosophy of
logic because the philosophical point of view that is adopted and the conclusions reached
will determine, at least to a large extent, what is comprehended under or taken to count
as logic.
Throughout the history of western philosophy what is called logic has included, in addition
to the formal logic discussed above, the Transcendental Logic of Immanuel Kant (1724-
1804), and the dialectical logic of Johann Gottlieb
Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and
especially G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). There has also been the materialist dialectic logic
of Karl Marx (1818-1883), and psychologistic logic of such figures as Wilhelm
Wundt (1832-1920) and others. There has also been the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) and his followers, including Martin Heidegger (1889-1976),
and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (1930-
2004) and others, and other outgrowths of Continental philosophy.
Another major topic of enormous discussion and disagreement in Western philosophy, at
least since the time of David Hume (1711-1776) and his devastating critiques of it, is the
existence and status of supposed "inductive logic." The problem of induction arises
because all inductive inferences are, technically speaking, invalid because the premises
of an inductive argument can all be true and the conclusion nevertheless be false. Yet the
sciences seem to require or rely on inductive logic and methods. There has been a great
deal of work on supposed methods of inductive logic, including John Stuart Mill's Mill's
Methods, Charles Sanders Peirce's account of inductive logic, and the work of Rudolf
Carnap and many others, especially the proponents of logical positivism, who seemed to
need an inductive procedure in order to work out their program. Karl Popper, however,
claimed that he had solved the problem of induction by discarding it in favor of his method
of falsification. This controversy about whether there is any inductive logic, and if so how it
is to be understood and accounted for, continues.
In addition to those, there is today what is often known as fuzzy logic, or deviant
logic, advocated by Susan Haack and others. This movement prizes vagueness, among
other things, and is based, at least partly, on quantum mechanics, which seems to defy
classical logic. This movement also owes a great deal to Quine and his famous paper
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in which he suggested, by implication if not directly, that
even the supposed laws of logic are subject to pragmatic considerations, and change if
necessary.
