Question Could a newly discovered law of physics ever change/affect a law of logic?

Accepted:
February 19, 2006

Comments

Very good question!

Let's begin by drawing an important distinction. By "changing a law of logic", you might mean (i) our changing our minds about what the laws of logic are, or (ii) the actual laws of logic changing -- one set of laws was in force at one time and another set is in force at another time. I will assume you had option (i) in mind, since the idea that the laws of logic change is at least as weird as the idea that the laws of physics change (which is to say: pretty weird), and in any case, the change would surely not be a result of something as cosmically inconsequential as our making a certain scientific discovery!

So, your question now is: Could we be justified in changing our minds about what the laws of logic are as a result of a discovery in physics? This is a controversial question. Some philosophers have said that we know the laws of logic a priori -- that is, independent of sensory input. In general, such philosophers do not think that we could justly change our minds about what the laws of logic are as a result of a discovery in physics. If a discovery in physics led us to recognize that, say, the distributive law of logic (i.e., "p and (q or r) if and only if (p and q) or (p and r)") is false, then we really recognized this fact independent of any particular observation made by scientists. The scientific discovery simply caused us to recognize something; it did not play any role in our justification for our new beliefs about the laws of logic.

On the other hand, some philosophers (Duhem, Poincare, Carnap, famously Quine, and Putnam at certain moments) have thought that our beliefs about the laws of logic are just as vulnerable to being overthrown by observations of the world as our strongly held scientific theories are -- which is to say, it would take some very remarkable observations to overthrow these beliefs, but that this sort of thing can happen, especially in a "scientific revolution." Some philosophers have even argued that discoveries in quantum mechanics have called into question the distributive law (mentioned above).

Question Could a newly discovered law of physics ever change/affect a law of logic? Accepted:February 19, 2006

Question Could a newly discovered law of physics ever change/affect a law of logic?

Accepted:
February 19, 2006