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More than argument, logic is the very structure of reality | Aeon Essays

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A page from American philosopher Charles M Peirce’s Logic Notebook. Courtesy the Houghton Library, Harvard University by Timothy Williamson + BIO A page from American philosopher Charles M Peirce’s Logic Notebook. Courtesy the Houghton Library, Harvard University is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. His latest books are Suppose and Tell (2020) and, with Paul Boghossian, Debating the A Priori (2020). Edited byNigel Warburton Maria is either at home or in the office. She’s not at home. Where is she? You might wonder why I started with such an unpuzzling puzzle. But in solving it, you already used logic. You reasoned correctly from the premises ‘Maria is either at home or in the office’ and ‘She’s not at home’ to the conclusion ‘Maria is in the office.’ That might not seem like a big deal, but someone who couldn’t make that move would be in trouble. We ne

Maria is either at home or in the office. She’s not at home. Where is she? You might wonder why I started with such an unpuzzling puzzle. But in solving it, you already used logic. You reasoned correctly from the premises ‘Maria is either at home or in the office’ and ‘She’s not at home’ to the conclusion ‘Maria is in the office.’ That might not seem like a big deal, but someone who couldn’t make that move would be in trouble. We need logic to put together different pieces of information, sometimes from different sources, and to extract their consequences. By linking together many small…

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