Quahom1 said:
Good day,
The three laws of thought are what I am referring to:
1. The law of identity - ergo "what ever is, is"
2. The law of contradiction -ergo "a thing cannot both be and not be"
3. The law of excluded middle - ergo "a thing must either be, or not be"
Aristotle founded the concept of logic, and has not been superceded in his work, only expanded upon.
Q
This is a whole philosophic can of worms, isn’t it, really beyond a forum of this kind to get anywhere near the bottom of and certainly beyond the expertise of this simpleton. However, you have suckered me into throwing in my two cents.
First, Aristotle may be alive and well, but a few things have happened in philosophy since he was making his peripatetic way around the ancient world and many more “logics” have been invented that at least supplement if not contradict these basic rules. The “excluded middle” for example didn’t appear to bother the Buddhists all that much – that’s where arguably philosophers like Nagarjuna set up shop. As well, the general drift of the Anglo-American tradition as well as much of modern philosophy is to see logic as language rather than as law, i.e., descriptive rather than proscriptive of reality.
The three laws you talk about can quite easily be seen as arising naturally from pressing necessities: is this food or not, is this a danger or not – there’s only one right answer. The world, however, presents more complicated challenges to our descriptors. Is this sub-atomic event a wave or a particle? Am I the same as yesterday or different? Is the reality of self individual or interdependent? Where does the self end and the world begin? Uber-fans of logic will of course say that all these questions are simply wrongly put, that the logic itself is perfectly fine, and thank you very much!
But again, this whole issue can explode in a thousand directions, all of which would quickly take me out of my depth. But I guess the question at hand is really how we use the language tools of logic in approaching ultimate reality (whatever that means, and everyone will have different ideas). IMO, there’s a tradition in the west – and I hope this doesn’t insult anyone – to use Aristotelian type logic in religious questions almost as a diversion, as a way to occupy those of an analytic or intellectual bent. A recent sojourn with Catholic apologists on one of their forums brought this home to me. (For future reference, here’s the apologetic method: 1. Cut off all the exits with the assumption that a very specific faith/belief precedes all discussion; 2. Meander through an entertaining series of sophisticated if sometimes sophistic argumentation, citing August Authority; 3. Just when your interlocutor is nodding off in pleasant slumber, bring down the hammer: Believe or die!)
Personally, I’d like to put in a plug for the general approach of William James, following his pragmatic rule: what makes no difference is no difference. It's a method open to all evidence, mental/spiritual/experiential as well as physical, while admitting the possible efficacy of all concepts, and not relying on some notion of eternal laws of logic, but evolving language/logic rules as adequate as possible to the complex nature of reality, and to our continual exploration.