Is Philosophy a Branch of Logic?

Abstract

According to the customary view, logic is a mere subdiscipline or ad junct of philosophy in so far as it is relevant to philosophy at all, and a sub discipline of mathematics to the extent that it is not. Thus, philosophy is taken to have traditional proprietary rights on its logic. I would like to examine here the reverse proprietary attitude, according to which philosophy is a branch of logic. It is clear that a radical proposal along these lines cannot be defended if one's view of logic is a very narrow one, or if one's conception of philosophy precludes from the start that the discipline could ever be pur sued in the framework of any kind of no matter how powerful and en compassing it might become. For that reason, we shall examine a view of logic sufficiently wide to allow that the fundamentals of some very powerful systems of grand logic, as well as specializations, such as deontic-, epistemic, and tense-logics are indeed systems of logic; and we shall ex clude views of philosophy according to which that discipline finds essential expression in actions or attitudes, rather than in theories. Since both one's conception of logic and that of philosophy are crucial to the present inquiry, it seems essential to examine both, even though it is notoriously difficult to specify the nature of any discipline. I venture to ex press some views regarding logic and philosophy only because the present topic seems to demand it. It may be well to begin by discouraging some considerations that ap pear to me irrelevant. For a start, my remarks are not going to conform to the expectations of those who hold that the primary goal of philosophy is merely that of dissolving linguistic confusions?unless it be also granted that logic is a tool designed for the same end. Nor can I please those who maintain that philosophy consists merely in attitudes, methods, or dialectic?except if the attitudes which are characteristic of philosophy (perhaps bodies of beliefs) are governed by rational laws, the methods are allowed to be precisely codified, or the dialectic is one whose rules can also serve semantical pur poses. In effect, I shall leave to one side conceptions of philosophy which preclude that logic can not also be similarly conceived. It seems harmless to assume instead that all of logic and philosophy are essentially involved in theory construction. This assumption rules out logic