On Lei Ma’s Substitution Logic

Xingyu Lyu

doi:10.22158/jrph.v3n1p58

Abstract

According to Lei Ma’s substitutionism, one basic characteristic of the human thinking process is the substitution or replacement of thinking elements. Based on this account, a new version of syllogism, namely the substitution logic, can be developed. In this brief comment, I discuss the big advantages of substitution logic over the classical syllogism (including Aristotle’s syllogism and the traditional syllogism) and examine some presuppositions implied in the substitution logic.

Highlights

According to Lei Ma’s substitutionism, one basic characteristic of the human thinking process is the substitution or replacement of thinking elements
Vol 3, No 1, 2020 (b) The possibility that the predicate of a sentence can be quantified is ignored by the classic syllogism, which merely incorporates the quantification of the subject in a sentence
(c) The classification of the categorical proposition in classic syllogism into four kinds, i.e., universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative and particular negative, misses out an abundance of terms in ordinary language that can be served as link term of a sentence, such as “like”, “are not”, ”know”, “do not know”, etc

Summary

Introduction

According to Lei Ma’s substitutionism, one basic characteristic of the human thinking process is the substitution or replacement of thinking elements. Vol 3, No 1, 2020 (b) The possibility that the predicate of a sentence can be quantified is ignored by the classic syllogism, which merely incorporates the quantification of the subject in a sentence. (c) The classification of the categorical proposition in classic syllogism into four kinds, i.e., universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative and particular negative, misses out an abundance of terms in ordinary language that can be served as link term of a sentence, such as “like”, “are not”, ”know”, “do not know”, etc.

Results

Conclusion