Is not learning a type of thinking? — Harry Hindu

Animals can think in the sense they are conscious and can respond intelligently to situations. But the OP was about the evolution of logic. And my point is that it piggybacks on the new semiotic machinery that is grammatically structured speech.

What makes humans different is all the differences that this new habit of structured thought can make.

There is the old story (perhaps apocryphal, but it seems right according to my experience of dogs' behavior) about the dog tracking a fox by scent along a path. She comes to a three-way fork in the path. She sniffs down one, and finds no scent. She sniffs down the other and finds no scent. So then without bothering to sniff for the fox's scent, she immediately continues the chase down the third.

This seems like protologic. To be sure the dog is not explicitly saying to herself 'there was no scent on the first or second forks, so the fox must have gone down the third'; given that we accept the dog has no symbolic language that is not what is in question. What is in question is whether we should count the dog's intuition as a kind of logic, or as logical in a kind of basic sense. It certainly seems that such intuitions must underlie the human capacity for explicit logical formulation; the fact the we are not merely following rules, but that we "get it".

The fact is that birds are subjectively experiencing [...] So not just biochemical and physiological drive [...] — Enrique

This is just not the tree I was barking up, but that's on me, I could have been clearer.

If I put together a jigsaw puzzle by selecting a piece at random and then performing a brute-force search for pieces that connect to it properly -- matching shapes and colors, the usual rules -- and then repeat this process with the new edges of my work in progress until the puzzle is complete, I can be successful without having any idea what the final form will be. (I do this consciously, sure, and we can say all sorts of stuff about how I do this and how I come to be able to do this.)

It was this distinction I was trying to draw attention to: between a more-or-less top-down approach, guided by knowledge of what the final result is supposed to be, and a more-or-less bottom-up approach that focuses only on what the permissible next steps are.

Formal logic -- which you allude to at the top -- aspires to the mechanical, to rules only concerned with what the permissible next steps are. This is a little odd.

What is in question is whether we should count the dog's intuition as a kind of logic, or as logical in a kind of basic sense. — Janus

It seems easy to credit animals with inductive reason and hard to credit them with deductive reason.

The brain is set up to form general rules from particular experiences. These are what habits of though are. They create natural states of expectation based on prior experience. So all animals would be as good at this kind of inductive reason in proportion to their brain size. Humans included.

Deductive reasoning is then the opposite. The ability to derive consequences from general rules. Thus it is the ability to generate non-habitual responses to the problems of life.

That requires the further step of forming that rule as its own notion in the mind and not some unconscious habit of generalisation. You have to know the rule as something "objectively stated" and not just "subjectively acted out", as in applying a inductive habit that generates an expectation.

So - as in pragmatic reason - the full story of the rational mind involves the three steps of abduction or hypothesis forming, deduction or consequence forming, and inductive confirmation or the rule checking that can add it safely to our store of habits.

The fox story doesn't seem a clear enough test of the two alternatives - mere animal induction vs full human reasoning - to answer the question even if it truly happened.

Is seems quite plausible that a fox could be trained to develop this inductive habit. If the same thing happened often enough, the rule would form as an implicit habit. Once you have exhausted other paths, the remaining path has to be the path.

It would seem obvious from accumulated experience rather than because the fox stopped, thought, reasoned it out as a first time exercise in forming a hypothesis, deducting the expected consequence, trotting off and discovering inductively if the expectation matched the new rule just posed.

So the distinction between induction from experience and deduction from hypothesis ought to be a sensitive test of where the line gets drawn in terms of whether a grammar of language is in play.

The situation has to be objectified to be made subject to the empiricism of a rational mindset. That requires a new kind of tool - grammatical speech - to do the job.

But an animal - put into an experimental apparatus like you describe - will also learn to decode the rationality implicit in the situation with enough inductive experience. It will implicitly get the explicit logic that went into the design of an arrangement of three forks and one that is correct.

This is why experiments in animal cognition can seem to show that animals are more capable of deduction than they naturally are. An artificial environment can be used to force the desired outcome.

Animals can think in the sense they are conscious and can respond intelligently to situations. But the OP was about the evolution of logic. And my point is that it piggybacks on the new semiotic machinery that is grammatically structured speech.

What makes humans different is all the differences that this new habit of structured thought can make. — apokrisis

There are many rules of logic and some are more fundamental than others, like the law of non-contradiction, excluded middle, and identity. It seems to me that the very act of having objects of thought is a manifestation of these three fundamental "rules". It's not so much as rules that we make up after the fact, rather they are simply how thinking works. No object of thought breaks any one of these three fundamental laws. And this raises the question why we have rules for thinking in the first place.

What is in question is whether we should count the dog's intuition as a kind of logic, or as logical in a kind of basic sense. It certainly seems that such intuitions must underlie the human capacity for explicit logical formulation; the fact the we are not merely following rules, but that we "get it". — Janus

Isn't what we get is the rules for thinking correctly? What every thinker eventually realizes is that in some cases what they thought was wrong, and you can only try to learn what you did wrong by doing more thinking. Corrective thinking is logical thinking. Learning the proper way to think is the fundamental aspect of logic and this entails learning from one's mistakes. Did the dog instinctively know that 3-2=1, or is it something that was learned by experience - by making mistakes? Isn't that what learning is - making mistakes, remembering them and trying something different?

It seems easy to credit animals with inductive reason and hard to credit them with deductive reason. — apokrisis

I agree. That the fox went down the third path, given there is no fox-scent on the first and second paths is not deductively certain, that is, it doesn't logically follow that the fox must have gone that way; we and the dog would just think it is most likely.

I think my reply to apokrisis should answer this.

Both inductive and deductive reasoning make use those three fundamental rules of thought that I mentioned. My point was that there are many rules of logic. By practicing some but not all rules, are you still being logical?

It seems to me that both inductive and deductive reasoning are simply reasoning from different directions. If a dog can make generalizations from observations then why wouldn't it not be able to apply those generalizations to observations? Thats what learning and applying what you learn is. What reason would you learn something if not to apply what you learnt in some similar situation in the future?

What if the dog knew that foxes only run down paths, then the only place the fox could be is down the last path, or had the experience of observing a fox avoiding paths and darting through thick bushes? It would then understand that it should sniff more than all the paths but also the bushes. Humans and dogs reasoning are limited by their experience and their attention span and memory capacity but humans seem to be the only ones aware of this fact.

The fact is that the dig can learn from observing the behavior of foxes, and it may make mistakes, and you learn from your mistakes. If the dog never finds the fox down the last path, what did it learn?

It seems easy to credit animals with inductive reason and hard to credit them with deductive reason. — apokrisis

Again, the question is whether the ape reasoned [whichever the duction] by giving meaning to symbols, by being able to play the social game of pretending to point them at things. That would be logic in the human (as opposed to pocket calculator or trained neural network) sense. — bongo fury