Logic and the Methodology of Empirical Sciences

Abstract

For some time, one of the most typical (and emphasized) characteristics of ‘modern’ logic was that of qualifying as ‘scientific’, in contradistinction to traditional logic, which was meant to be simply ‘philosophical’. We shall not be interested in analysing the hidden meaning underlying that distinction, which surely expressed, at an initial stage, a kind of mistrust of traditional logic: those times — which go back to the early stages of logical positivism — are quite far away by now, and a number of distinguished scholars openly declare themselves concerned with problems of ‘philosophical logic’. What might still be worth remembering are rather the reasons why modern logic claimed to be ‘scientific’, and these are essentially twofold. On the one hand, the characteristic of scientificity appeared to be the fact that the new logic had adopted the configuration of a respectable mathematical discipline, including the feature of having been explicity axiomatized. On the other hand, its appurtenance to the family of sciences was evidenced by the fact that its aim was assume to be, among others, that of providing an exact (and also practical) analysis of the processes or ideally to be adopted in scientific investigation and theory building. It is, obviously, the second aspect that made modern logic relevant to the methodology of science, with particular emphasis upon the methodology of formal sciences, i.e., mathematics.