SUO: Re: Logic & Programming Languages
David,
The Talmudic and Scholastic scholars who developed the reasoning
techniques of the Judeo-Christian tradition were good students
of Aristotle and Plato. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher
who lived from 20 BC to 50 AD, worked on reconciling the Bible
with Greek philosophy. See
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/p/philo.htm
He had a major influence on Christian scholars (and some say on
the Gospel according to John, which begins "In the beginning was
the logos). Most of the early ones, including St. Augustine,
were more strongly influenced by Plato.
The major flowering of medieval thought was in the 12th and 13th
centuries, which was strongly based on Aristotle (largely through
translations from Arabic in the early days, but later directly
from Greek to Latin). Following is an article on Scholasticism:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13548a.htm
"Hawley, David" wrote:
> Very interesting exchange. The contention that logical forms are arbitrary
> seems to me false. However, forms of informal argumentation and rhetoric
> may be, for example, culturally influenced (I'm thinking of some of the
> argumentation in the Judeo-Christian scriptures that seems a little odd to
> me).
Most of the argumentation is straight out of Aristotle. But if you
have problems with the reasoning, it is probably from the content
rather than the form.
> Can someone remind me :-) of the relation of these forms to
> deduction/induction/abduction, and how to think of their semantics?
They are all based on how an implication p->q is used or derived.
Deduction: Given p and p->q, conclude q.
Induction: Given many examples of p and q, and no examples of
p and not q, conclude p->q.
Abduction: Given q and p->q, make a guess that p is the reason for
q and verify that the guess is consistent with everything else
that is known.
John Sowa