Methods of Logic

Quotes

Logic, like any science, has as its business the pursuit of truth.

Truths are as plentiful as falsehoods, since each falsehood admits of a negation which is true. But scientific activity is not the indiscriminate amassing of truths; science is selective and seeks the truths that count for most, either in point of intrinsic interest or as instruments for coping with the world.

Language is a social institution serving, within its limitations, the social end of communication; so it is not to be wondered that the objects of our first and commonest utterances are socially shared physical objects rather than private experiences. Physical objects, if they did not exist, would (to transplant Voltaire's epigram) have had to be invented. They are indispensable as the public common denominators of private sense experience.

But utterances about physical objects are not verifiable or refutable by direct comparison with experience. They purport to describe, not experience, but the external world. They can be compared with the external world only through the medium of our experience of that world, but the connection between our experience and the world already involves a step of hypothesis or inference which precludes any direct and conclusive confrontation of the utterance with its subject matter. There is many a slip betwixt objective cup and subjective lip.

So statements, apart from an occasional collectors' item for epistemologists, are connected only deviously with experience. The latest scientific pronouncement about positrons and the statement that my pen is in my hand are equally statements about physical objects; and physical objects are known to us only as parts of a systematic conceptual structure which, taken as a whole, impinges at its edges upon experience. As far as knowledge is concerned, no more can be claimed for our whole body of affirmations than that it is a devious but convenient system for relating experiences to experiences.