Around the time computers entered public life, a relatively
unknown writer of science fiction described the world of non A
(A). It is our planet Earth in the year 2560, and what non A
denotes is the non-Aristotelian logic embodied in a
super-computer game machine that rules the planet. Gilbert
Gosseyn (pronounced Go Sane, with an obvious pun intended) finds
out that he is more than just one person.
Anyone even marginally educated in the history of logic will
spontaneously associate the experience described here with
Levy-Bruhl's controversial law of participation. According to
this law, "In the collective representations of primitive
mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, in a way we cannot
understand, themselves and something different at the same
time." The relatively undifferentiated, syncretic human
experience at the time of the inception of notation and writing
testifies to awareness of very unusual connections. Research of
artifacts originating with primitive tribes makes clear the
relative dominance of visual thinking and functioning of human
beings along the line of what we would today call multi-valued
logics.
The world of non A, although placed by its author in some
fictional future, seems to describe a logic prevalent in a
remote time. Even today, as anthropologists report, there are
tribes in the Amazon jungles and in remote Eskimo territories
whose members claim to be not only the beings they are, but also
something else, such as a bird, plant, or even a past event.
This is not a way of speaking, but a different way of
ascertaining identity. Inferences in this pragmatic context go
beyond those possible in the logical world of truth and
falsehood that Aristotle described. Multi-valued logic is
probably a good name for describing the production of such
inferences, but not necessarily the explanation we seek for why
it is that self-constitution involves such mechanisms, and how
they work. Moreover, even if we could get both questions
answered, we would still wonder-because our own
self-constitution involves a different logic-what the relation
is between the language experience and the logical framework of
those living in the non A world of ancient times. Practical
experiences with images, dominant in such tribes, explains why
there is a logical continuum, instead of a clear-cut association
with truth and falsehood, or with present and absent.
Multi-valued logics of different types, corresponding to
different pragmatic contexts, were actually tamed when language
was experienced in its written form and thinking was stabilized
in written expressions. Awareness of connections distinctly
integrated in human experience and quantified in a body of
intelligible knowledge progressively clears the logical horizon.
As many-valued logics were subdued, entities were constituted
only as what the experience made them to be, and no longer
simultaneously many different things.
The change from orality to the practical experience of written
language affected many aspects of human interaction. Writing
introduced a frame of reference, ways to compare and evaluate,
and thus a sense of value associated with limited choices.
Orality was controlled by those exercising it. The written,
stabilized in marks on a surface, gave rise to a new type of
questioning, based on its implicit analyticity. Over time
written language led to associations. Some were in relation to
its visual aspect. Other associations were made to writing
patterns, a kind of repetition. Integrative by its nature,
writing stimulates the quest for comparing experiences of
self-constitution by comparing what was recorded. The
expectation of accurate recording is implicit in the experience
of writing. The rather skeletal incipient written language makes
visible connections which within orality faded away.
A very raw definition of logic can be the discipline of
connections-"if something, then something else"-that can be
expressed in many ways, including formal expressions.
Connections established in orality are spontaneous. With writing,
the experience is stabilized and a promise for method is
established. This method leads to inferences from connections.
What I am trying to suggest is that although there is logic in
orality, it is a natural logic, reflecting natural connections,
as opposed to connections established in writing. Writing
provides the X-ray of the elusive body of experience in whose
depths awareness of connections and their practical implications
was starting to take shape.
Time and space awareness are gained relatively slowly. In
parallel, connections to experiences in time and space are
expressed in an incipient awareness of how they affect the
outcome of any practical experience. No less than signs, logic is
rooted also in the pragmatics of human self-constitution, and
probably comes into existence together with them. Co-presence,
of what is different or what is alike, incompatibilities,
exclusions, and similar time or space situations bcome
disassociated from actions, objects, and persons and form a
well-defined layer of experience. Mechanisms of inference, from
objects, actions, persons, situations, etc., evolve from simpler
configurations or sequences of connections. Writing is more
effective than rituals or oral expression in capturing
inferences, although not necessarily in providing a mechanism
for sharing. What is gained in breadth is lost in depth.
As human practical experiences get more effective they also
become more complex. The cognitive effort substitutes more and
more for the physical. Stabilized in inferences based on
increasingly more encompassing cycles of activity-agriculture is
definitely more extensive than hunting or food
gathering-experience is transmitted more and more in its
skeletal form, deprived of the richness of the individual
characteristics of those identified through it. Less information
and more sequences of successful action-this is how from the
richness of connections logic of actions takes shape. The accent
is on time and space, or better yet on what we call, in
retrospect, references. As writing supplants time-based means of
expression and communication (rituals, first of all), temporal
logic begins to lose in importance.
Once the pragmatic horizon of human life changes, literacy, in
conjunction with the logic it houses, constitutes its invisible
grid, its implicit metrics. The understanding of anything that
is not related to our literate self-constitution remains outside
this understanding. Literate language is a reductionist machine,
which we use to look at the world from the perspective of our
own experience. Aware of experiences different from ours, at
least of their possibility, we would like to understand them,
knowing perfectly well that once captured in our experience of
language, their own condition is negated. Oral education
maintained the parent-child continuum, and memory, i.e.,
experience, was directly transmitted. Literacy introduced means
for handling discontinuity and, above all, differences. It
stored, in some form of record, everything pertaining to the
experience. But as record, it constituted a new experience, with
its own inherent values.
As a reductionist device, writing reduces language to a body of
accepted ways of speaking, recording, and reading governed by
two kinds of rules: pertinent to connections (logic), and
pertinent to grammar. The process was obviously more elaborate
and less focused. In retrospect, we can understand how writing
affected the experience of human self-constitution through
language. It is therefore understandable why those who,
following the young Wittgenstein, take the logic of language for
granted, seeing only the need to bring to light what is
concealed in the signs of language, are wrong. Language does not
have an intrinsic logic; each practical experience extracts
logic from the experience and contaminates all means of human
expression by the inference from what is possible to what is
necessary.