Summary
Nature is logical because elemental logic has been implicitly abstracted from natural processes. The symbolic representation of logical statements shows a “form” that logicians have long believed to guarantee the truth of statements. This is most applicable to deductive logic in which the conclusions are implicit in the premise. In contrast, inductive logic cannot be formalized and is inferred from many specific observations to make a general hypothesis, whose validity can be tested. This is the essence of the scientific experimental method and presupposes the uniformity of nature. Inductive logic is the product of our intelligence and capacity to observe, describe, and encode natural phenomena in our brain, a view that philosophers and logicians have traditionally dismissed. Drawing valid conclusions is a natural process that can be observed in preverbal humans and in animals.
… [T]he universe is known to man only through logic and mathematics, the product of his mind, but he can only know how he constructed mathematics and logic by studying himself psychologically and biologically …
—J. Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology
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Notes
- 1.
Humans and animals have many innate abilities (suckling, walking, etc.) that require some practice to make them fully functional. Innate abilities are explainable by preformed circuits that become functional at birth.
- 2.
Different symbolic and graphic notations were introduced by mathematicians, such as George Boole, Giuseppe Peano, Leonhard Euler, John Venn, Charles S. Peirce, and others.
- 3.
Formal systems exercise a mysterious attraction for logicians and mathematicians, some of whom do not realize that everything is matter-energy. Contrary to Plato’s dreams, forms without matter do not exist, because thinking is a physical process.
- 4.
For recent progress see Refs. [10–15]. In addition, there are several entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html, and several sites on the WWW.
- 5.
Piaget has been systematically ignored by philosophers. In part, this could be explained by Piaget’s use of a psychological language full of unconventional theories and figures of speech.
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Musacchio, J.M. (2012). Nature is logical, because logic is natural. In: Contradictions. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27198-4_9
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