The Complete Logician, or Miss Blackmore's Unspeakable Sin: Mike Alder asks what is wrong with being charmingly illogical. Quote: "A series of science/fantasy novels by Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague deCamp started in the nineteen forties, and were collected later in The Incompleate Enchanter. They featured Harold Shea, who travelled into the world of Norse Myth, and subsequently into other fictional worlds, including Spenser's Faery Queen and the Finnish epic the Kalevala. This was accomplished by the syllogismobile: it consisted of reciting and focussing the mind on the underlying logical premises of these worlds. While it made entertaining fantasy, even in my early teens I was sceptical of the efficacy of a syllogismobile, although it did turn my adolescent mind to the question of logic. Other SF books with a related element were the Null-A books of A.E.Van Vogt, in which the hero is equipped with two brains and can think in a non-Aristotelian logic, an ability denied to lesser mortals. Contemplating the ideas underlying the books, the question arises: what is the status of Logic? Does it, as Pratt and Sprague deCamp suggest implicitly, underlie the structure of the Universe? Or does it as Van Vogt suggests underlie the structure of our minds or brains? Is it possible for a human being to think in a non-classical logic? Could other logics be used, possibly to advantage in understanding this world we live in? These ideas were heady and liberating, and I knew sufficiently little to feel free to speculate and to reason - and even to read, with some difficulty, some of the works of the logician Emil Post on non-Aristotelian logics. [...]"
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posted by johannes,
Friday, June 11, 2004
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