From <a href=http://www.socialanarchism.org/mod/magazine/display/128/index.php>this site</a> Quote:<ul>It [logic] is thus a product of evolution and is “universal” only in the sense that is shared by all human beings (and probably at least some other animals). Nearly all reasoning takes place at a subconscious level; all that comes to the surface is what we need for immediate action in a given situation.</ul>
This is how the author claims that cognitive science views logic.
I got a whiff of this is the little reading of Lakoff that I have done.
I differ not from the author says but with what the author says that the cognitive scientists say.
I agree that logic is a product of evolution but it is a product in same sense that our eye is a product of evolution.
It seems that the eye with one lens has evolved a number of times and the details differ but the master plan is the same—because there is just one good design and that design is “out there”.
Evolution is better said to have discovered it several times than to have invented it.
I claim that logic is “out there” to be discovered and that when extra terrestrials come to visit us, they will have something isomorphic to our logic.
<p>Logic is under attack on another front by those who point out the confabulation phenomenon where we seem to find spurious ‘logical’ reasons for actions and opinions.
I think the phenomenon is real and somewhat of a spandrel, although it may be adaptive to fool our conspecifics into agreeing with us.
We fool ourselves in the process but it may be adaptive to converge on an idea.
It is also the tool of scoundrels.
<p>The point about logic and mathematics in the next paragraph is valid and fascinating.
It is a reprise of G. H. Hardy’s observation of the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’.