THE LAWS OF THOUGHT (excerpts)

THE LAWS OF THOUGHT, 2008

THE LAWS OF THOUGHT is an exploration of the deductive and inductive foundations of rational thought. The author here clarifies and defends Aristotle’s Three Laws of Thought, called the Laws of Identity, Non-contradiction and Exclusion of the Middle – and introduces two more, which are implicit in and crucial to them: the Fourth Law of Thought, called the Principle of Induction, and the Fifth Law of Thought, called the Principle of Deduction. This book is a thematic compilation drawn from past works by the author over a period of eighteen years.

Philosophy in Review, 2010

Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume, 2009

Frege taught us to strictly distinguish between the logical and the psychological. This doctrine has deeply influenced the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind, language and logic. And it was praised, of course, by Wittgenstein, early and late. On closer inspection, however, the way in which Frege frames his anti-psychologism opens a crack in his system that appears in several places. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein's so called ‘rule-following considerations” address this difficulty and are intended to show that the ‘crack’ eventually brings down the whole edifice and with it this way of framing the celebrated distinction between the logical and the psychological. The investigation of how the rule-following paradox arises within Frege sheds, I think, light on the systematic difficulty and brings out the fact that the solutions that have been proposed in the literature don't get to the root of the problem.

Principia: an international journal of epistemology, 2011

In the Organon Aristotle describes some deductive schemata in which inconsistencies do not entail the trivialization of the logical theory involved. This thesis is corroborated by three different theoretical topics by him discussed, which are presented in this paper. We analyse inference schema used by Aristotle in the Protrepticus and the method of indirect demonstration for categorical syllogisms. Both methods exemplify as Aristotle employs classical reductio ad absurdum strategies. Following, we discuss valid syllogisms from opposite premises (contrary and contradictory) studied by the Stagerian in the Analytica Priora (B15). According to him, the following syllogisms are valid from opposite premises, in which small Latin letters stand for terms such as subject and predicate, and capital Latin letters stand for the categorical propositions such as in the traditional notation: (i) in the second fig

Analysis, 2016

BA thesis in theoretical philosophy , 2020

In this paper I argue nous should be understood as an integral part of the process of induction and not, as some scholars have argued, only as a result of it. Aristotle’s version of induction, unlike a common conception of it in our time, is not a matter of generalization over a sample of a given population, the conclusion of which is then extrapolated to all or part of the total population. It rather relies on a form of mental insight or intuition which is to be understood as an ability to grasp a certain sort of universal features of things called, 'the why' or first principles, which, as well as epistemic concepts, constitute the principles which organize the natural world. It is precisely this correspondence between the first principles of reason and those of the natural world that for Aristotle explains the type of intuitive induction herein attributed to him. I furthermore argue we should be careful of drawing conclusions about the nature of the involvement of nous in the grasping of first principles on the basis of APo alone. The main reasons I give for this are found in the connections I draw between Aristotle’s account of the grasping of the first principles from Met. I.1, the account of the intellectual grasp of the forms in DA II & III and the process of induction described in APo II.19. Although by some it is considered to be controversial to do so, I argue these texts should all be understood as parallel accounts, describing from different points of view, one and the same intuitive process of knowledge acquisition.

Philosophical Topics, 2021

It is a platitude that when we reason, we often take things for granted, sometimes even justifiably so. The chemist might reason from the fact that a substance turns litmus paper red to that substance being an acid. In so doing, they take for granted, reasonably enough, that this test for acidity is valid. Although it is a platitude that we often take things for granted when we reason—whether justifiably or not—one might think that we do not have to. In fact, it is a natural expectation that were we not pressed by time, lack of energy or focus, we could always in principle make explicit in the form of premises every single presupposition we make in the course of our reasoning. In other words, it is natural to expect it to be true that presuppositionless reasoning is possible. In this essay, I argue that it is false: presuppositionless reasoning is impossible. Indeed, I think this is one of the lessons of a long-standing paradox about inference and reasoning known as Lewis Carroll’s (1985) regress of the premises. Many philosophers agree that Carroll’s regress teaches us something foundational about reasoning. I part ways about what it is that it teaches us. What it teaches us is that the structure of reasoning is constitutively presuppositional.

2017

We study comprehensive analysis of the inductive arguments done by various researchers. These researchers have surveyed the basic concepts in logic such as statement, argument, premise, conclusion, deductive argument, inductive argument, primitive terms and axioms. The fundamental laws of Aristotelian logic and Hume's critique of induction are briefly discussed. We argue that all the basic rules of Aristotelian logic are inductively obtained generalized abstract statements. Existence of undefined terms is also analyzed. We conclude that every argument based on Aristotelian logic is a result of induction.

2016

From physics to society∗ Abstract. In Part I of our joint paper [WuB13], we outlined our respective theories, The Basic Theory of the Philosophy of Information (BTPI) and Logic in Reality (LIR) and showed their synergy for the understanding of complex informational processes. In this part, we develop Wu’s fundamen-tal philosophical insight of the origin of the values of information in the interactions of complex information processing. A key concept in our work is that of a logical isomorphism between human individual and social value and the natural laws of the physical world. On the basis of Wu’s concept of Informational Thinking, we propose an Informational Stance, a philosophi-cal stance that is most appropriate for, and not separated nor isolated from, the emerging unified theory of information. We propose our metaphilosophy and metalogic of information as further support for the ethical development of the Information Society.