My Top Philosophy Pieces of 2019, #3
5. Christopher Menzel, “In Defense of the Possibilism-Actualism Distinction” . (Post)
4. Edward Zalta, “Essence and Modality”. (Post)
3. Aaron Cotnoir, “On the Role of Logic in Analytic Theology: Exploring the Wider Context of Beall’s Philosophy of Logic”.
I would argue that anyone who is interested in the topic of where theology meets logic needs to read this piece. Often, theologians assume there is a thing called logic and its laws are inviolable, and they typically assume such a thing because they had a brush with an introductory class on classical logic and natural deduction. Or perhaps they have read second-hand how logic has been used historically by theologians who are philosophically aware to some degree. But take a look at just the table of contents from the recent Journal of Symbolic Logic and you’ll get a sense of the diversity, depth, and breadth within contemporary logic.
Part of what Cotnoir wants to argue is that “the time is ripe for theologians to explore their (non-classical) logical options.” Now, some (mostly armchair) theologians may bristle at the term ‘non-classical’ and believe it implies a position that 1) rejects whatever logic(s) produced during antiquity and the medieval period, and 2) is inconsistent with ‘classical theism’. The term implies neither, though the word ‘classical’ in logic is used in a loosely similar way to how it’s used within theology, carrying all the vague and unhelpful baggage that comes with such a sweeping term.
As he says in the paper, “Theologians should, I argue, think of logical methods as a set of tools for constructing (closed) theories, and not think of logic as a universal foundation for all possible theories”. Theologians have historically sided with a view called exceptionalism, where “basic logical laws and inferences are valid because they are analytic”. (510) This is the view that sees logic as the universal foundation for all possible theories. The competing theory, and the one that Cotnoir argues for, is anti-exceptionalism, where “basic logical laws and inferences are not generally stipulations or constitutive rules governing concepts. One can perfectly well understand the meaning of logical concepts whilst rejecting some of the purported ‘rules’ that govern its use”. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that, outside the discipline of philosophy (and even internal to the discipline in some cases), few include the explosion of logical and linguistic developments that have occurred within analytic philosophy in the 20th century, and this lack of inclusion is true for theologians as well.
In the last half of the 20th Century, there has been a massive development of a huge number of non-standard formal logics. For almost any basic logical rule, there is a system violating it. Many of these non-classical systems have been put to fruitful use in attempting to solve difficult philosophical problems. (511)
Those who neglect such developments risk mischaracterizing the discipline of philosophy, the role logic plays within it, and how theology might relate to both. For those who want to immediately equate anti-exceptionalism with relativism, Cotnoir addresses such a claim and denies it, appropriately.
I won’t rehearse all the details of the article, but the piece ably hits the high points of what you would want in an article on logic and theology: how consequence and entailment are understood, gaps, gluts, how theology and its relation to logic might be different from other disciplines and their relation to logic, and so on. On this latter point, the article argues for the uniqueness of theology as a discipline, which is a point needing more attention from philosophers who consider themselves theologically aware. The strength of Cotnoir’s point regarding the relationships between disciplines is that he makes it in an informed way, drawing on conceptual resources like modeling, analogical predication, and other relations that are often used in a merely common-sense way within theology. So I’ll end with a quote from the piece to drive your interest:
The first disanalogy between theology and the sciences is that the ‘target phenomena’ of theology is a reasoner whose thoughts are beyond our conceptual repertoire. Thus, the logical system we are using to model God need not be a model of God’s logical system. One might use models to attempt to go further: one might try to model God’s mental life by assigning (representations of) mental entities to parts of a theology in order to represent God’s logic. Such a theological inquiry would represent a human model of God’s mental life, which may be more or less accurate but always an incomplete approximation. But we should not confuse the two distinct things: the correct logic for human inquiry into the divine vs. the correct logic for divine inquiry. We may have no access to the latter. And logic-as-modelling does not assume that the correct consequence relation for human theorising about God is the consequence relation that God uses in his own mental life. (521)
2. Language Turned on Itself: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Metalinguistic Discourse, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore.
- Paul Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.
