Advances in Historical Studies, 2021, 10, 247-276
https://www.scirp.org/journal/ahs
ISSN Online: 2327-0446
ISSN Print: 2327-0438
DOI: 10.4236/ahs.2021.104016 Dec. 23, 2021 247 Advances in Historical Studies
A New History of Logic: The Laborious Birth of a
Formal Pluralism
Antonino Drago
University “Federico II” of Naples, Naples, Italy
Abstract
The paper starts by remarking that the ancient Greek word for “truth” was
“alétheia” (unveiling), which is a double negation. But, after Plato the affir-
mative meaning of the idea of truth has prevailed. The same meaning was
reiterated by Romans’s word for truth, veritas. Not before the year 1968 the
double negation law was re-evaluated, since its failure was recognized as
representing, more appropriately than the failure of the excluded middle law,
the borderline between classical logic and almost all non-classical kinds of
logic. Moreover, its failure is easily recognized within a (scientific) text; which
therefore can be analyzed in a new logical way. As an example, the analysis of
Kolmogorov’s 1932 paper about the foundations of the intuitionist logic shows
many interesting results, in particular his reasoning through arguments per-
taining to the same intuitionist logic. In addition, previous papers have sug-
gested—through a comparative analysis of all scientific theories which are
based, like the previous one, on a general problem—that there exists a new
model of organization of a theory which is alternative to the deductive-axi-
omatic model and it is governed by intuitionist logic. Some important logical
events pertaining to non-classical logic are recognized by inspecting through
both the double negations and this new model of organizing the original texts
of past theories; so that the entire history of logic appears as a development
along two main lines, one line representing classical logic dominated all oth-
ers for a very long period of time, although at the origins the logical arguing
had pertained to the alternative line. This history of logic confirms both Kuhn’s
category of a paradigm and Koyré’s categories, represented by him through a
couple of “characteristic propositions” in mutual conflict; analogous couples
of propositions are suggested as representing the categories for adequately
interpreting the entire history of logic.
Keywords
Double Negation, Intuitionist Logic, Kolmogorov’s 1932 Paper,
How to cite this paper: Drago, A. (2021).
A New History of Logic: The Laborious
Birth of a Formal Pluralism. Advances in
Historical Studies, 10, 247-276.
https://doi.org/10.4236/ahs.2021.104016
Received: October 25, 2021
Accepted: December 20, 2021
Published: December 23, 2021
Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and
Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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