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I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that
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Philosophers on Twitter have been abuzz with this news:
Yale philosophy has officially replaced the grad program “logic requirement” with a broader “formal methods requirement.” Students can choose which course to take (logic, probability, stats, game theory, etc.)
This seems like a sensible move. When philosophy of language dominated Anglophone philosophy, logic seemed more important than it probably is today for many areas of the discipline. Thoughts from readers?
This does not seem new, at least for philosophy of science programs. Pitt HPS, for example, dropped a grad logic requirement in 2021. What is required now is (as far as I can tell) basic undergrad symbolic logic plus "further coursework, at either the upper-level undergraduate or graduate level, involving formal methods in an area approved by the DGS." They say that the formal methods may "include a more advanced course in logic (such as logical theory, mathematical logic, or modal logic), higher mathematics (such as set theory, linear algebra, calculus, probability and statistics, or other specialized area of mathematics), or computational methods (ranging from computer programming to theory of computation and including suitable courses in digital humanities or information science)." So more math or programming or digital humanities can replace a grad logic course. This seems eminently sensible and useful. I got this from their handbook (https://www.hps.pitt.edu/graduate/graduate-student-handbook#PhD-Formal) but maybe someone from Pitt HPS can verify. Of course Yale (and other non philosophy of science programs) taking this step is probably more notable.
Symbolic logic is the most overrated idea in philosophy since Plato's Forms. Critical thinking, forms of arguments, fallacies, etc., is much more helpful.
Can verify. (Though Pitt philosophy has a more standard logic requirement.)
I believe that the fixture of logic courses in the curricula for advanced philosophy degrees is a place where explanation and justification come apart.
In the middle of the last century, logic was seen as a principal site of intrinsically worthy philosophical phenomena, evident both in results about completeness and incompleteness, undecidability, definability, and the like and also in the very recent exhibit of heady conceptual questions taking up precise scientific reformulation. For a few decades now, a much smaller portion of philosophical action takes place at this site than it once did, and the justification of its presence in our curricula has shifted to it being a tool that one can bring to bear on phenomena elsewhere. Readers of Gian Carlo Rota's "pernicious influence" essay will be familiar with ways in which the result has been a disservice to philosophy but also to logic. In short, it is no compliment to logic to say that its mandate should continue because it gives us the skills we need to philosophize well.
I happen to think that logic remains a principal site for intrinsic philosophical engagement. But I wouldn't pu its classical results forward as more suited to this role than, say, Bell's theorem, the Lorentz transformation, Fischer's selection theorem, Hamilton's rule, etc., and we don't require coursework in modern physics or evolutionary biology.
Strawson, Toulmin & others, starting in the 1950s, showed that artificial languages do not capture the complexities of their natural counterparts. Yet, no one can doubt a strong foundation in logic is crucial to quality philosophical work. How else can you construct a strong argument? But that foundation need not be symbolic logic & the type of work we inherit from Frege, Godel, Russell & others. I am not going to pontificate on what "a strong foundation in logic is." Only discussion and experience can answer that question.
Many would point out that the lines of reasoning exhibited in philosophical writing or not typically much more sophisticated than those exhibited in writing about experimental design in metallurgy, Medieval manuscript attribution, or epidemiology. Maybe once-iterated modus ponens. Anyway, cogent argument construction or verification is not what is covered in logic classes.
There are many philosophical disciplines besides philosophy of language, where a firm grounding in logic is absolutely essential for being able even to follow the relevant literature. This obviously applies to the philosophy of mathematics but also to epistemology (logics of knowledge and belief for non-ideal agents, epistemic paradoxes), metaphysics (property theories, anti-realism, modality and higher order modal logic) and topics like vagueness, conditionals and, especially, truth.
Apart from the fact that logic is a presupposition for coming to grips with some of the most important literature on some of the most important philosophical topics, logic itself is a discipline that resonates very much with philosophical considerations. This is not so much apparent for model theory as it developed since, say, Morley's categoricity theorem. But it certainly holds for disciplines like computability theory, proof theory, temporal logic or relevant logic.
Agreed of course that there are many topics where logic is needed (though I’m less convinced that many need the detailed proofs of metatheorems that are the bread and butter of most grad-level logic courses). But no-one is saying logic courses shouldn’t be available to the (perhaps many) students whose interests require them – the issue is whether it should be a requirement for everyone.
Similarly, there would be quite a long list of topics for which 20th century physics is important, but I wouldn’t be keen on a compulsory physics requirement.
To the extent a philosophical problem can be thought of as a set of jointly inconsistent propositions all of which are epistemically attractive, getting a basic grasp of logic is necessary for an understanding of what philosophy is doing (despite that understanding the epistemic attraction part is where the meat comes in). Having a basic grasp of logic is relevant to all branches of philosophy (including philosophy of physics), not only philosophy of language.
News to me that this is news.
Perhaps it’s often practice rather than policy, but my understanding is that many programs have for some time allowed other formal methods to be substituted for logic when it makes pedagogic sense (e.g., statistics rather than logic for students with empirical interests). This certainly seems to be the case at my current program (Cornell/Philosophy) and my previous one (WashU/PNP).
While acknowledging the centrality of logic to some philosophical fields, I share the skepticism voiced by Curtis and David regards the “pervasive relevance” of formal logic to philosophical research. I expect a sense for something like “it follows” is requisite for doing philosophy, but I doubt a graduate course in formal logic is requisite for, or even especially conducive to, developing this sense.
I am Not very fond of this idea. As others have said in this Comment section I think it's conducive to perceive logic to be a broader subject matter that also covers what we call "informal logic" or "argumentation theory", meaning the analysis of what makes arguments seem convincing.
But otherwise cutting off formal logic is basically suicide for any serious Form of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy without logic would be like continental philosophy without the concept of plurality of opinion and heightened dogmaticism – which you basically see right now.
As I recall somewhere CS Peirce wrote on the importance of having a solid foundation of logical training. He called logic "a craft everyone thinks is possessed by virtue of their intelligence alone. But is is one that needs to be developed and cared for steadily."
Also in our rather narrow field of legal philosophy it's interesting to see how both People from a Kelsenian tradition AND followers of Dworkin are opposed to logical methods. I think the best work in general jurisprudence in the 20th century has been "normative systems" by Bulygin and Alchourron. Logic would certainly benefit legal research a lot.
When you're hunting for counterexamples, you tend to find one and call it a day. That was always the weakness of mid-to-late 20th century analytic philosophy. Sure you proved that A isn't B, but how close might they be?
When you're using conditional probabilities, you're open to updating and to further empirical investigation. Ironically, you're actually using the math that last-century types could only mimic.
I can agree that we might find our way on this topic with some advice from Peirce: "One singular consequence of the notion which prevailed during the greater part of the history of philosophy that metaphysical reasoning
ought to be similar to that of mathematics, only more so, has been that sundry mathematicians have thought themselves, as mathematicians, qualified
to discuss philosophy; and no worse metaphysics than theirs is to be found."
Clark Glymour once wrote an introductory philosophy textbook ("Thinking Things Through," MIT Press, 1992) motivated by the idea that students should be exposed to philosophy at its best: SUCCESSES of philosophy, not the depressing landscape of perpetually unresolved debates. The first third is about logic: how Aristotle's attempt to give an account of demonstrative reasoning led to modern symbolic logic, which gives a mathematically precise (though partial, since the question of why axioms are accepted is separate) conceptual analysis of the notion of classical mathematical proof. It does seem that people planning to go on to teach philosophy should at least renew their acquaintance with this success story in graduate school. (Which isn't to say that they shouldn't ALSO study probability and decision theory: nobody should try to teach … anything from philosophy of science to philosophy of religion… without understanding Bayes's Theorem, or ethics or political philosophy without understanding what the notion of "maximizing expected utility" does or doesn't give us!)
Which said… the environment of philosophy teaching at North American colleges and universities is depressing. I have looked at a fair number of Philosophy Department websites out of curiosity: a depressingly high proportion of departments, even at reputable institutions, have NO faculty members listing logic as a specialization.
Third and last remark. Several people have mentioned "informal logic" and "critical thinking". The value of undergraduate courses with these titles is far from clear. (Comparing the results of beginning of semester and end of semester tests of the skills these courses are supposed to impart is … not encouraging.) One habit and skill that CAN be taught in such a course is the habit of looking for, and the ability to find, the argumentative structure in a "discourse" (which can be a journal article or a newspaper editorial or …): which of the statements made is intended to give support to which. And (thinking about my own development) I think the study of formal logic (in particular, perhaps, of something like Gentzen's style of natural deduction in which derivations are organized into trees with premisses above (final or intermediate) conclusions they support) can, osmotically as it were, help to develop these habits and abilities even in informal contexts.
In the old days it was quite common for undergraduate "core" curricula to have a requirement like "mathematical and logical thinking", which might be satisfied by an elementary symbolic logic course as well as 'regular ' math courses and some kind of 'math for poets' class. A few years ago our regional accreditors changed what was acceptable in cores, so that they had to have a much more computational/quantitative component. A couple of colleagues in philosophy (I'm in math) told me they were happy at the change, since it meant that Phil 100 was no longer full of random gen ed students, and they could make it a better course for their majors. However, I wonder whether in smaller schools this has been a problem for keeping student counts up, and safeguarding the existence of the department.
David Ross,
I worked at a State University that had a General Education program in which our formal logic course and our critical thinking course fulfilled a critical thinking requirement. One third of the students at the university took one of those courses. When the Gen Ed program was bring revised, my colleagues were sleeping at the wheel, and let this requirement be eliminated. Our student numbers plummeted. First, we lost all the students who were placed in those courses because they had to take a critical thinking/logic course. Second, we also lost the opportunity to recruit those students for other courses. Many students takes a course in logic or critical thinking against their will. They discover they like it – and then they take other philosophy courses. Incidentally, even though our logic courses had a rather mixed audience, even the computer science students enjoyed it. It was an easy course for them, but they would often remark on the fact that they learned something from us that they were not getting in their CS courses.
My post was directed to Brian Leiter's argument: "When philosophy of language dominated Anglophone philosophy, logic seemed more important than it probably is today for many areas of the discipline."
I deny the premise that logic is less important today for many areas than it used to be. It's actually quite the contrary.
Responding to the point about Peirce's belief in the importance of logic — he definitely wasn't trained in what qualify as a graduate level logic class today, because the field hadn't been developed yet!
If you'll consider the views of a non-philosopher who has read far too much Heidegger:
Attempting to use logic in (field x) is a disservice to (field x), which has its own nature, and someone who practices it according to those forms has disposed the day just as well as a logician who has worked according to logic. That said, thinking logically can reveal what it is that we do when we practice field (x). But being able to bear relation to all things isn't necessarily equivalent to being able to help them along. It's an end, not a means.
Re: the Kelsen/Dworkin reference, supra: you can grok both 'law as norm' and 'rights as trumps' without understanding their place in the tradition, i.e., what the thinker was trying to accomplish by putting them out there. Which is another instance of the same error; albeit an error by which the undergraduate thrives.
Cheers.
I've frankly never heard of a capable philosopher who was incompetent in quantitative reasoning, which some might argue is an inborn facility in some, but in any case, who can doubt is also something that can be acquired and quite ably developed by people who one might describe as being intellectually nataly quite average? In other words, the prolonged practice of & exposure to formal quantitative methods surely has deep lasting effects upon the mind, especially if engaged in from an early age.
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