Page 17 - Future Logic

1 – INTRODUCTION 15

‘Modality’, simply put, refers to concepts like possibility and necessity, which pervade
knowledge in many different senses. Thought without modality is very limited in scope; much
of our thinking depends on conceiving what the alternative possibilities are.
Modality is an incredibly creative force, which, like a crystal instantly solidifying a
liquid, rushes through every topic and restructures it in new and interesting ways. I want to
show how logic is forcefully pushed in a multitude of directions, as soon as modality and its
ramifications are taken into account.

b. Targets.
In writing this book my ambition was to invigorate logic — to contribute to the science,
and to revive interest in it by all segments of society.
Thus, it is intended equally for laypersons and scientists, for students and educators,
and for professional logicians. It is equally a popularizing book, a text-book, and a research
report.
My goal is not only to explore new avenues for the science of logic, but especially to
make its teachings accessible to a wide public. For this reason, even while attempting to write
a scholarly treatise, I do my best to keep it readable by anyone.
The book is full of ground-breaking discoveries, which should impress any logic
theorist, and perhaps put him or her back to work. I mean, not just a peppering of incidental
insights, but entirely original areas of concern, directions, and techniques, as will be seen.
Though well-nigh encyclopedic in scope, it is not a compilation, but presents a unified system.
Although addressed to a wide audience, this is not an elementary work; it is an
attempt to transmit advanced logic to everyone. My faith is that we have all reached a level of
education high enough to absorb it and use it.
The book moves from the more obvious to the less so, from the simple to the complex,
and from the old to the new, so that a layperson or student lacking any previous acquaintance
with the subject-matter can grasp it all, granting a little effort. The order of development is
thus natural and didactic, rather than strictly ‘logical’ in the sense of geometry. It is easy, at
the end, when we know what we are talking about, to review the whole, and suggest a ‘logical’
ordering which consolidates it.

c. Strategies.
My approach is strongly influenced by Aristotle; all I do is push his methods into a
much broader field. The primary purpose of logic should be to teach people to think clearly.
For this reason, I try to develop the subject in ordinary language, and avoid any excessive
symbolization.
Modern logicians have managed to overturn the very spirit of the discipline of logic,
and made it cryptic, obscure, and esoteric. This was a disservice to the public, depriving it of
an important tool for living, since most people lack the patience to decipher symbols.
Logical science as such has also suffered from this development. Logic has no intrinsic
need of symbols other than those provided by ordinary language. An artificial language in
principle adds nothing to knowledge, just as renaming things never does. Symbolization as
such is just a quaint footnote to logic, not a real advance.
Symbols are to some extent valuable, to summarize information in a minimum of
space, or to discover and highlight patterns in the data. But taken to an extreme, symbolism
can lock us into simplistic mind-sets, and arrest further insight, limiting us to making trivial
embellishments. Worse still, it can distance us from empirical inputs, turning logic into a
game, a conventional, mechanical manipulation of arbitrary constructs, without referents,
divorced from reality.
Also, I try as much as possible in this volume to avoid philosophical issues and
metaphysical speculations, anything too controversial or digressive — and to concentrate on
the matter at hand, which is formal logic. Some comments on such topics are inserted at the
end, for the record.
A logician is of course bound to get involved in some wider issues. Every logical
analysis intimates something about ‘thought processes’ and something about ‘external reality’.
Logic somehow concerns the interface of these parallel dimensions of epistemology (the study
of knowing) and ontology (the study of being), and it is hard to draw the lines.