Is Logic an Art or Science? Essay

INTRODUCTION: Logic is the science and art which expresses the mind in the procedure of analysis and additional processes as to allow it to accomplish clarity, reliability and strength in that process. To define and arrange our ideas and other mental images, reliability in our decision and strength in our processes of conclusion is the basic aim of Logic. The word logic has been derived from the Greek word ‘Logos’ which means reason. Aristotle, the founder of science, assigns it as â€Å"analytic† and the Epicureans use the word canonic. But from the time of Cicero, the word logic has been used without exemption to select this science. Definitions of Logic: An interesting fact about logic is the science which delights the definition; logicians have not determined as to how logic itself should be defined. Here are some of the definitions of logic: The Port Royal Logic: â€Å"The Art of motive in the accomplishment of knowledge for one’s own lessons and that of others. † Hegel defines Logic as â€Å"Science of clean thought. † St Thomas Aquinas says â€Å"Logic is the science and art which straightens the act of the motive, by which a man in the implementation of his reason is allowed to proceed without mistake, uncertainty or needless complexity. † Logic Science or Art Logic is the science of the process of conclusion. What, then, is conclusion? It is that psychological operation which proceeds by merging two premises so as to cause a resulting conclusion. Some suppose that we may infer from one premise by a so-called â€Å"immediate inference. † But one premise can only reproduce itself in another Form, e. g. all men is some animals; therefore some animals are men. It requires the combination of at least two premises to infer a conclusion different from both. Aristotle was the creator of logic as a science. But he placed too much pressure on interpretation as syllogism or deduction, and on deductive science; and he laid too much pressure on the linguistic study of coherent conversation into plan and stipulations. These two faults remain embedded in practical logic to this day. But in the course of the growth of the science, logicians have endeavored to correct those faults, and have diverged into two schools. Some have dedicated themselves to initiation from sense and experience and broaden logic till it has become a general science of conclusion and precise method. Others have dedicated themselves to the psychological analysis of reasoning, and have pointed logic into a science of beginning, ruling and interpretation. The conceptual logic presumes that beginning always leads judgment; but the reality is that sensory judgment starts and inferential judgment ends by earlier commencement. The supposed triple order—conception, ruling, analysis—is flawed and fake. The genuine order is feeling and sensory ruling, formation, remembrance and memorial judgment, skill and observed judgment, conclusion, inferential decision, inferential formation. This is not all: inferential formations are insufficient, and lastly not succeed. They are frequently symbolical; that is, we imagine one thing only by another like it, e. g. atoms by tiny bodies not nearly small enough. Often the representation is not like. What idea can the physicist form of interspatial ether? What believer in God imagines to envisage Him as tie really is? We consider many things that we cannot imagine; as Mill said, the unthinkable is not the unbelievable; and the point of science is not what we can imagine but what we should consider on evidence. Formation is the weakest; decision is the strongest power of man’s mind. Intellect before conception is the original cause of decision; and conclusion from sense allows decision to carry on after conception stops. Finally, as there is decision without conception, so there is conception without decision. The main purpose of logic is to direct us how out of decisions to structure the conclusion indicated by conversation; and this is one point which conceptual logic has given to the science of conclusion. But why mess up the additional intellectual analysis of inference by assuming that conceptions are elements of decision and therefore of inference, which thus becomes just a composite mixture of conceptions, an addition of ideas? The mistake has been to convert three process of mind into three procedures in a fixed order—conception, decision, conclusion. Conception and decision are judgments: conclusion alone is a process, from decisions to decision, from judgments to judgment. Sense, not conception, is the origin of judgment. Conclusion is the procedure which from decisions about sensible things proceeds to judgments about things alike to rational things. Though some formations are its surroundings and some decisions its sources, conclusion itself in its inference causes many more decisions and formations. Finally, inference is an extension, not of ideas, but of beliefs, at first about existing things, after-wards about ideas, and even about words; about anything in short about which we think, in what is too fancifully called â€Å"the universe of discourse. † Formal logic has occurred out of the constriction of conceptual logic. The science, of inference no doubt has to agree mainly with recognized truth or the steadiness of premises and closing. Real and formal, is a reliable, official rule of reliability becoming authentic rules of truth, when the premises are correct the stable conclusion is therefore true. The science of inference again correctly emphasizes the official thoughts of the syllogism in which the combination of premises connects the conclusion. The question of logic is how we suppose in fact, as well as entirely; and we cannot appreciate inference if we believe in inferences of probability of all kinds. The study of analogical and inductive inference is essential to that of the syllogism, because they find out the premises of syllogism. The proper thinking of syllogism is simply an essential outcome; but when its premises are essential principles, its conclusions are not only essential consequents but also essential truths. Hence the mode in which induction assisted by identification finds out necessary values must be considered by the logician in order to make a decision when the syllogism can actually turn up necessary conclusions. The science of inference has for its subject the appearance, or procedure, of consideration, but not its material or substance. But it does not pursue that it can examine the former without the latter. Formal logicians say, if they had to think the matter, they must also think all things, which would be unfeasible, or choose some, which would be illogical. But there is a transitional option, which is neither unfeasible nor illogical; namely, to believe the broad divisions and main beliefs of all things; and without this general deliberation of the material the logician cannot know the structure of consideration, which consists in representing inferences about things on these general values. Finally, the science of inference is not certainly the science of feeling, recall and knowledge, but at the similar time it is the science of using those cerebral operations as data of conclusion; and, if logic does not illustrate how analogical and inductive inferences straightforwardly, and deductive conclusion indirectly, arising from precedent experience, it becomes a science of simple thoughts without knowledge. Logic is connected to all the sciences, because it believes the frequent inferences and changeable methods used in exploring diverse subjects. But it is most intimately connected to the sciences of metaphysics and psychology, which outlines with it a chord of sciences. Metaphysics is the science of being in common, and therefore of the things which turn into objects held by our minds. Psychology is the science of intellect in general, and therefore of the psychological process, of which inference is one. Logic is the science of the procedure of inference. These three sciences, the objects of mind, the operations of mind, the processes used in the inferences of mind, are in a different way, but directly related, so that they are frequently perplexed. The genuine point is their interdependence, which is so close that one sign of great philosophy is a reliable metaphysics, psychology and logic. If the world of things is recognized to be partially material and partially mental, then the mind must have powers of intelligence and conclusion allowing it to know these things, and there must be procedures of conclusion moving us from and further than the sensible to the insensible world of substance and intellect. If the whole world of things is substance, process and procedure of mind are themselves material. If the complete world of things is mind, operations and procedures of mind have only to be familiar with their like all the world over. It is clear then that a man’s metaphysics and psychology must color his logic. It is therefore essential to the logician to know earlier the universal difference and values of things in metaphysics, and the mental operations of intelligence, formation, memory and experience in psychology, so as to find out the procedure of inference from experience about things in logic. The interdependence of this chord of sciences has from time to time led to their bewilderment. Hegel, having recognized being with thought, combined metaphysics in logic. But he separated logic into objective and subjective, and thus almost admitted that there is one science of the objects and another of the procedure of thought. Psychologists, seeing that conclusion are a psychological process; often manage a theory of conclusion to the disregard of logic. But we have a dual awareness of conclusion. We are aware of it as one operation amongst many, and of its omnipresence, so to articulate, to all the rest. But we are also aware of the procedure of the operation of inference. To a definite extent this subsequent awareness pertains to other operations: for example, we are aware of the process of association by which a variety of mental sources evoke ideas in the mind. But how modest does the psychologist identify the relationship of ideas, evaluated with what the logician has exposed about the procedures of conclusion. The truth is that our main awareness of all psychological operations is scarcely equivalent to our secondary awareness of the processes of the one operation of inference from premises to conclusions infusing long trains and including entire sciences. This complex consciousness of inferential progression is the explanation of logic as a distinct science. But it is not the entire technique of logic, which also and rightly thinks the psychological process essential to language, without replacing linguistic for psychological distinctions. Nor are awareness and linguistic analysis all the appliances of the logician. Logic has to believe the things we know, the minds by which we know them from intelligence, remembrance and experience to inference, and the sciences which arranges and expands our information of things; and having measured these facts, the logician must build such a science of conclusion as will clarify the control and the poverty of human information. Logic is the study of the methods and principles used to distinguish correct reasoning from incorrect reasoning. There are objectives criteria with which correct reasoning may be defined. If these criteria are not known then they cannot be used. The aim of the study of logic is to discover and make available those criteria that can be used to test arguments and to sort good arguments from the bad ones. The study of logic is likely to improve the quality of one’s reasoning for another reason. It gives the opportunity to practice the analysis of arguments and the evaluation of arguments and the construction of arguments of one’s own. With the methods and techniques in logic we can distinguish efficiently between correct and incorrect reasoning. BIBLIOGRAPHY †¢ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E. T. Jaynes http://bayes. wustl. edu/etj/prob/book. pdf#search=%22Logic%20as%20a%20science%22.