An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method

Morris F. Cohen

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Though formal logic has in recent times been the object of radical and spirited attacks from many and diverse quarters, it contin...

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Though formal logic has in recent times been the object of radical and spirited attacks from many and diverse quarters, it continues, and will probably long continue, to be one of the most frequently given courses in colleges and universities here and abroad. Nor need this be surprising when we reflect that the most serious of the charges against formal logic, those against the syllogism, are as old as Aristotle, who seems to have been fully aware of them. But while the realm of logic seems perfectly safe against the attacks from without, there is a good deal of unhappy confusion within. Though the content of almost all logic books follows (even in many of the illustrations) the standard set by Aristotle's Organon-terms, propositions, syllogisms and allied forms of inference, scientific method, probability and fallacies-there is a bewildering Babel of tongues as to what logic is about. The different schools, the traditional, the linguistic, the psychological, the epistemological, and the mathematical, speak different languages, and each regards the other as not really dealing with logic at all. No task is perhaps so thankless, or invites so much abuse from all quarters, as that of the mediator between hostile points of view. Nor is the traditional distrust of the peacemaker in the intellectual realm difficult to appreciate, since he so often substitutes an unclear and inconsistent amalgam for points of view which at least have the merit of a certain clarity. And yet no task is so essential, especially for the beginner, when it is undertaken with the objective of adjusting and supplementing the claims of the contending parties, and when it is accompanied by a refusal to sacrifice clarity and rigor in thought. In so far as an elementary text permits such a thing, the present text seeks to bring some order into the confusion of tongues concerning the subject matter of logic. But the resolution of the conflicts between various schools which it effects appears in the selection and presentation of material, and not in extensive polemics against any school. The book has been written with the conviction that logic is the autonomous science of the objective though formal conditions of valid inference. At the same time, its authors believe that the aridity which is (not always unjustly) attributed to the study of logic testifies to the unimaginative way logical principles have been taught and misused. The present text aims to combine sound logical doctrine with sound pedagogy, and to provide illustrative material suggestive of the rôle of logic in every department of thought. A text that would find a place for the realistic formalism of Aristotle, the scientific penetration of Peirce, the pedagogical soundness of Dewey, and the mathematical rigor of Russell-this was the ideal constantly present to the authors of this book.