A history of logic

Pretty sure I've shared this before, but heck it can have another one because it's good.

Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic of discovery. Its chief purpose is justification and exposition, which makes sense particularly against the background of dialectical practices, where interlocutors explain and debate what they themselves already know. Indeed, for much of the history of logic, both in ancient Greece and in the Latin medieval tradition, ‘dialectic’ and ‘logic’ were taken to be synonymous.

A disputation starts with a statement, and then goes on to examine arguments in favour and against the statement. It is essentially a dialogical practice in that it features two parties disagreeing on a given statement and producing arguments to defend their respective positions, even if both roles can be played by one and the same person. The goal might be simply that of convincing your interlocutor or the audience, but the implication is typically that something deeper is achieved, such as coming closer to truth on the matter in question by means of examining it from many different angles.

Plato goes on about this at some length, holding that writing is only a device for reminding rather than learning. You can't argue back to a piece of text, you can never know what its author really thought or if you could convince them they were wrong. Only through sincere dialogue, said Plato, could you really get at anything approaching the truth. Of course this doesn't mean you can't get useful information from written texts, but there is an experience to an interactive debate that cannot be fully replicated.

It is also not happenstance that the downfall of the disputational culture roughly coincided with the introduction of new printing techniques in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. Before that, books were a rare commodity, and education was conducted almost exclusively by means of oral contact between masters and pupils in the form of expository lectures in which textbooks were read out loud, disputations of various kinds, examinations. By the time of Descartes roughly two centuries later, the idea that a person could educate themselves on their own by means of books (which would have been virtually unthinkable before the wide availability of printed books) was well-established.

To return to Bocheński’s characterisation of the three grand periods in the history of logic, two of them, the ancient period and the medieval scholastic period, were closely connected to the idea that the primary application of logic is for practices of debating such as dialectical disputations. The third of them, in contrast, exemplifies an entirely different rationale for logic, namely as a foundational branch of mathematics, not in any way connected to the ordinary languages in which debates are typically conducted... The history of logic also leads us to question the overly individualistic conception of knowledge and of our cognitive lives that we inherited from Descartes and others, and perhaps to move towards a greater appreciation for the essentially social nature of human cognition.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic