Language III

Since the days of the Greeks we have had a science of logic which uses terms like deduction, induction, syllogism, etc. I am not so much interested in the structures of logic as what it is, how it works, and anyway I think many of the logical conundrums that have puzzled philosophers over the centuries are really linguistic problems and not true logic problems at all. My idea of logic depends on a given truth from which consequences are drawn. Medieval philosophers started with the premise that the universe was created by God, that he was a God of love, and that He was all powerful and all knowing, infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving. (These attributes, taught to me in catechism, puzzled me from an early age. It was equally hard for me to imagine a universe that didn't end as one that did. If it ended, then what was left? Even empty space is something. Yes, I really did spend a lot of daydream time thinking about this when I was ten years old or so.) From that foundation Medieval philosophers built their arguments. Whatever eternity was, it was a fact. God was a fact. That he was Good was a fact. Subsequent philosophers,unable to accept those premises have tried to find something that is ultimately true from which to proceed, and more recently they have decided that there is no real truth. That in itself is a premise which has led them, and the world, into a strange wilderness of the soul. The Eastern religious view of the world as a recurring illusion from which we should try to escape only carries the logic further.
By logic I mean the steps that follow a given set of premises. It doesn't mean the logic leads to truth. Quite often it leads to insanity. The logic is not necessarily at fault but sometimes it is. In this way it mimics language. Some would say that logic is language but that argument falls down when you realize there are other types of logic. Musical logic comes to mind, or mathematical logic. There are others, and as far as language goes it is often claimed that each language has a different logic that is related to vocabulary and language but separate from it. the example I am thinking of is Classical Greek which is said to lend itself to subtle differences in meaning impossible to express in translation. Could the language of a people shape the way it thinks? That by absorbing the logic of his native language actual changes in his neurophysiology are made? This is something that might be testable and thus acceptable to scientists as 'proof.'
Standard logic is just one species of the genus. A book I picked up the other day on logic provides this example of a standard logical problem: The Queen is rich/Either the Queen is rich or pigs can fly. This formulation the author calls a disjunct because the second statement doesn't follow from the first. But how do we know it's a disjunct? Because we already know that queens and pigs have nothing to do with each other and in any event pigs don't fly. But there is nothing wrong with the two statements from a linguistic point of view. All the words are valid, and the grammar is correct, allowing the person uttering the statement to convey the thought with perfect clarity. If it was spoken to someone from another planet who had a perfect understanding of the language but knew nothing about pigs, queens or flying he would have no reason to question it.
I think a reconsideration of what logic is can clear up a lot of that confusion, because at the root of the confusion is the interaction of grammar with vocabulary, as in language. It is absurd to try to find meaning based solely on grammar, which is what logicians try to do. It is equally absurd to try to understand the meaning of a string of words without a knowledge of the grammar. This is what scientists do. Scientists try to infer the grammar by studying the words, logicians try to understand the words by studying the grammar. To put it in semi -mathematical form, words + grammar = meaning. We humans crave meaning. We find meaning through the evidence of our senses mediated by reason. And reason seems to be the faculty we use to perceive patterns that are not directly related to the proverbial four senses. So is reason our fifth sense" Do we perceive patterns directly and are they just as real as rocks? In life we are more certain of what our senses tell us because our senses boil down to two: pain and pleasure. We try to get it right because being wrong can result in pain or worse. But to make sense of the world we have to use reason which enables us to perceive patterns that are not the material objects but which sometimes inhere, sometimes not, in the objects themselves. Furthermore, before we can judge the validity of a statement, we must already have an understanding of what truth is. We may not know what the truth is until we experiment, and it may be exceedingly difficult to know the truth, but we have no doubt that there is such a thing as truth. Unless you are a modern French philosopher.
Important point:
Meaning isn't the same thing as truth.
Of course we know about lies and deceptions but people are surprisingly easy to mislead. The science of logic began as a way of helping to determine the logical validity of a statement and avoid being misled. Numerous logical pitfalls were discovered.
Take the liars paradox. There are many variations but the simplest goes like this: I am lying. Obviously, if I am lying I am telling the truth in which case I am lying...by telling the truth. It's very interesting to explore the ambiguities of language and often commentators are so shocked they are led to deny the possibility of knowledge.
True it is, as any writer can attest, that conveying a precise picture in language of something he sees is immensely difficult if not impossible. So he might bemoan the deficiencies of language. But that would be to miss the bigger picture, which is this: language is incredibly effective. It is truly miraculous how much information can be conveyed with language. Civilization is made of language. Not even the simplest of human cultures could exist without language.
In effect we no longer inhabit a world governed solely by material processes. We also inhabit a universe of our own creation which we breezily refer to as culture- and language underlays all human culture. If there is such a thing as natural selection then the environment we now select for is one of our own making, and this environment is composed of thoughts, ideas and a multitude of things we don't even have words for. This is what language does.