Putting together a brief history of logic for a writing project, but don't have much expertise in the area so could benefit from some guidance. Does this account seem generally valid, any obvious flaws?


Logic has its roots in the very essence of our planet’s matter. At the beginning stages of biological evolution, aggregate mass with its thermodynamic properties gelled into organismal structures which became differentiated from their environments in growingly complex ways, altogether an intricate relative locality that would give rise to spatiotemporal awareness upon the emergence of sense-perceptual faculties. This interfacing amongst both organic and inorganic locality is adequately described by the law of the excluded middle, an encapsulating statement of the general mutual exclusivity in time and space induced by partial quantum decoherences of particularization within large collections of Earth’s atoms.

Interactions of organic and inorganic mass as well as between nascent organisms exerted evolutionary selection pressure for life’s chemical reactivity to become more nuanced in its responsiveness to surrounding conditions, allowing some creatures to win the biological sweepstakes by mutation-driven adaptations. This started as almost completely reflexive biochemical mechanisms of stimulus and response, but some cellular lineages gained the ability to etch sustained transcription of happenings into their molecular structures, enabling more predictive behaviors by primordial and then increasingly robust sensitization and habituation processes of representational memory.

Single-celled and eventually multi-celled organisms evolved perceptual apparatuses to better target the most salient stimuli, and their inner workings waxed variegated and large-scale enough that bioactivity consisted in not merely intricate systems of atomic attraction and repulsion closely analogous to laboratory chemistry, but a kind of holistic “flow”, the first sign of synthetic comportmenting we loosely refer to as libidinous drive, life’s dispositional impetus. Libido evolutionarily self-selected for bodily structure via substantive internal dynamics, impelling lifeforms towards macroscopically operative yet highly specialized organ systems and functional molecules with a vast assortment of relatively local or nonlocal atomic effects. This vitalism generated the nervous system, an involute hybridization of decoherent, thermodynamic particularity (comparative locality) with quantum coherent tunneling, entanglement and so on of synapses (comparative nonlocality), capable of tightly integrating far-flung bodily structures as libido’s control center and the locus of what would eventually bloom into conscious experiencing.

Perceptual capacities swelled in some lineages by way of accretions and refinements to the body and brain until libidinous drive involved a strong aspect of intentionality, cognitive complexes which interpret phenomena via the greater association-making plasticity of thought and motivate an organism in subtly and diversely modulated ways. The agglomerated modules of these first intentional minds served many functions: semiconscious control of interoceptive states, channeling and suppression of affect, binding of exteroception and proprioception into superior predictive responses to the environment, keener insight into all kinds of qualitative phenomenality, and a more logiclike, coherent organization of memory. At this stage, cognition had surpassed the relatively automatic, nonimprovisational nature of basic physiological mechanism, holding large arrays of both anticipated and actual outcomes together at the fore of awareness such that what we regard as choice could take place. Libido was no longer merely instinctual drive modified by behavioral trial and error, but highly discriminative purpose which ran trial and error experiments as purely hypothetical conceptualizings located entirely in the mind, not only more or less reflexively reacting and then adjusting to experiences but preemptively comprehending them.

In many lineages, affective, perceptual and conceptualizing states of consciousness differentiated and deepened, at the same time alloying into superfinely self-regulative functionalities, often under the growing sway of neuromaterial modules for self and social awareness. Greatly intentionalized admixing of observational facility, feeling and higher level thought transitioned association-making into relatively advanced reasoning, affect into emotion, perception with its kaleidoscope of impressions into a faculty largely subordinated to the self, altogether sublimating motive and causal recognition into intellecting desire. This graduated from the prehuman dichotomy of compulsions and protological ascertainments all the way to humanity’s civilized experience of existential conflict between aspirations and worldviews. Stark awareness of discrepancy between wishes and actuality, impinging upon the foreground of our psyches’ surplus, sometimes idle and frequently thwarted adeptness at envisioning unrealized possibility is the root of contradiction, an intentionality persistently challenging and even rebelling against the boundaries of that which it knows.


Academic logic’s history provides a perfect example of movement from the stasis of rhetorical essentialism to adapting theoretical positivism. Aristotle’s 4th century B.C.E. syllogistic logic was an essentialist model of persuasion, reducing natural language to metastatements, grammatically abbreviated ‘premises’ as for instance “Socrates is a man” and “all men are mortal”, containing atomic factual ‘terms’ such as “Socrates”, “man” and “mortal”, from which were derived ‘conclusions’ like “Socrates is mortal”, altogether including a narrow collection of inference types generalizing how a large range of explicit assertions are true or false. No indication is given that it should be regarded as a conditional, temporary approximation; the model is proposed with faith in its legitimacy, as a function of broad scope and self-consistency, for Aristotle even goes so are as to declare noncontradiction as the primary criterion of well-formed deduction. At this stage of ancient Greek academia, even the critique of rhetoric itself was committed to the tenet that efficacious theories imply ontology, in this case related to the nature of logos.

Chrysippus (b. 276 B.C.E.) and his successor Stoics invented propositional logic, more closely examining the properties of true and false statements. They began to refine the Aristotelian term framework into an algebralike format, inspired by advancements in mathematical proof, translating assertions of atomic fact along with their connective inferencing into metasymbolic denotation, much later reworked into a comprehensive technical system, e.g. S ^ P (either S or P), or S & P (both S and P). This transitioned logic from Aristotle’s technical rhetoric of apt explicit meaning’s supposed essence in natural language to logic as a progressional methodology, still looking to define some kind of essence, but with ascertainment that the modeling context is not absolute fidelity, instead modifiable as a series of improved explanations. This was early infusion of Kantianlike thinking, the critical and revisionary perspective on system-building, into a branch of philosophy, as well as insertion of certain Platonic-styled concepts of pure form, such as the aforementioned bifurcation (disjunction) and recombination (conjunction), into formulation of inference rules. It hybridized philosophical intuitions about the nature of structural form, which had been enhanced by materialism, with languagelike truth-value.

After some sporadic, nonsymbolic dabblings in the field as well as a barren period from the 15th to the 19th century, Gottlob Frege worked out a complete system of predicate logic at the turn of the 20th, with a fully algebraic notation similar to that used for formal deduction and proof in mathematics. Its grammar was entirely contrived, with no likeness at all to natural language; to the extent that logicians employed it in representing linguistic expressions, this was carried out by translation into a technical symbolism which is undecipherable to even a fluent speaker unless adequately instructed. Predicate logic eliminates all phonetic properties of natural language that are superfluous to concrete meaning, such as prepositions, conjunctions, tense or gender, arranging nouns and verbs in maximally compact formulas, e.g. ‘Sxy’, where ‘S’ stands for the predicate of a sentence, while the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’ symbolize subject and object, with the meaning of the formula determined by arbitrary rules of inference for variable relationships, explicitly specified at the outset. These ‘well-formed formulas’ are mixed and matched into compound statements expressing complex inferential relationships, then tandems of statements can be manipulated through series of steps to perform deductive proofs in an economical manner, exactly as in modern math. Philosophically speaking, predicate logic reduces expressions to the objects they are about, interpreted as subsisting within the boundaries of a contextual ‘universe’ - “humans”, “quantities”, “duck-billed platypuses” - with its specific criteria for inferential possibility. It is a concise, multipurpose way of describing objective truth-value and modeling relations between sets of existents.

This system was the next step in liberation from essence-conceptualizing, not merely malleable enough to encompass an ample breadth of meaningful forms like propositional logic, but at least in principle capable of being adapted to fit the object-context of any common, technical or symbolic language, old or new, with clear cognizance that it is a designed, pragmatic instrument, a so to speak technology of representation, not a naturalistic or exceptionally ontological entity. Yet predicate logic was still spellbound by a measure of essentialist commitment, namely the constrainment of object-contexts as such to the spatiotemporal frame of reference, attached to some naive realism groundrules for the nature of factual content, existents distinguished, acting and reacting while occupying mutually exclusive positions (law of the excluded middle) and in noncontradictory ways (law of noncontradiction), an interpretation of variables as consisting in forms analogous to material objects with their definite shapes, sizes and locations, basically a grammatical template for inferencing about an essentially corporeal rather than theoretical reality. It reified spatiotemporality, the conceptual substrate of mechanism, inorganic and organic matter in the sense-perceptual world, which is intrinsic to technological thinking and body awareness insofar as they are linked with properties of thermodynamic aggregate mass in Earth environments, erecting a technical idiom upon the functionally powerful but philosophically flawed premise that our macroscopic behavioral medium is of fundamentality in the phenomenal world.

Revival of formalism at the turn of the 20th century was in part a critical response to the 19th century psychologism that believed an acceptable theory of logic would be based on knowledge of the psyche. Logicians such as Frege and Edmund Husserl argued that this radically intuitionist paradigm, by viewing logic as psychical rather than a universalizable mode of reasoning, had subjected it to all kinds of unscientific and pernicious presumptions about the human spirit, heredity, instinct, predisposition, discrepancies between subcultures, ethnicities and individuals, an obsession with thinking of rationality as preternaturally or sociobiologically determined aptitude, fomenting a nativist relativism anathema to objectivity. Proponents of the analytical paradigm as well as those of Kantian-inspired, phenomenological Idealism regarded psychologism as a debasement of science with the nihilism that some such as Nietzsche had warned might one day engulf Europe.

Rapid improvements in the discipline of formal logic spurred its exponents towards the ambitious goal of forging a comprehensive theory of truth-value. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead coauthored Principia Mathematica, a three volume work which assigned itself the task of uniting all extant mathematics within a single theoretical system of metaprinciples and formal symbolic notation under the assumption that methodologies and techniques of quantification are based on a self-coherent universe of logical inferences and operations. Then in the 1930’s a movement called logical positivism came together in Europe, influenced by philosophers of the Vienna Circle, taking on the objective of grounding all mathematics and scientific research on logical foundations, with a symbolic language suitable to all theoretical efforts, a universal framework for objectivity. While this paradigm invigorated further research in the field of logic, it succumbed to the quagmire of essentialism, asserting that the only meaningful questions in philosophy are those formulatible in its terminological system, which if embraced as standard methodology would have expunged subjectivity, literature, and much of historical metaphysics from mainstream inquiry. The consequences did not turn out to be this immoderate, but nevertheless induced a divergence of ‘Analytic’ philosophy with its anchorage in formal logic from the rest of the philosophical tradition, along with a possible role in inciting the sharp divide between hard sciences and the humanities that persists in academia to this day.

Research in the discipline of logic expanded into numerous specializations, particularly many that are affiliated with math, like set theory, proof theory, computability theory and model theory. Intuitionist logic eliminated the law of the excluded middle from its inferential systems, which was especially useful for constructing mathematical proofs with nonspatial entities, and paraconsistent logics provided inferential systems which even omitted the law of noncontradiction, applied in modeling the structure of conflicting arguments among much else.


All the help you can give is welcome.