6 - The Problem of Inference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
Summary
In his essay “The Justification of Deduction,” Michael Dummett describes what might be called the problem of deduction:
The existence of deductive inference is problematic because of the tension between what seems necessary to account for its legitimacy and what seems necessary to account for its usefulness. For it to be legitimate, the process of recognizing the premisses as true must already have accomplished whatever is needed for the recognition of the truth of the conclusion; for it to be useful, a recognition of its truth need not actually have been accorded to the conclusion when it was accorded to the premisses. Of course, no definite contradiction stands in the way of satisfying these two requirements: recognizing the premisses as true involves a possibility of recognizing the conclusion as true, a possibility which will not in all cases be actualized. Yet it is a delicate matter so to describe the connection between premisses and conclusion as to display clearly the way in which both requirements are fulfilled.
(Dummett 1978, 297)This succinctly states a problem many nineteenth-century philosophers faced. Though sympathetic to deductive logic, they still smarted from the modern anti-Aristotelianism voiced in John Locke's complaint that traditional logic is not “the proper instrument” of reason (1975, 670). Locke admitted that all legitimate reasoning could be reduced to forms of the syllogism, but he thought those forms unnecessary “cumbersome Fetters … that clog and hinder the Mind” (1975, 672). Though he thought syllogisms legitimate, he did not find them useful.
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- Information
- The Logical Foundations of Bradley's MetaphysicsJudgment, Inference, and Truth, pp. 128 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004