"Is Logic Empirical?" is the title of two articles (one by Hilary Putnam and another by Michael Dummett) that discuss the idea that the algebraic properties of logic may, or should, be empirically determined; in particular, they deal with the question of whether empirical facts about quantum phenomena may provide grounds for revising classical logic as a consistent logical rendering of reality. The replacement derives from the work of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann on quantum logic. In their work, they showed that the outcomes of quantum measurements can be represented as binary propositions and that these quantum mechanical propositions can be combined in a similar way as propositions in classical logic. However, the algebraic properties of this structure are somewhat different from those of classical propositional logic in that the principle of distributivity fails. The idea that the principles of logic might be susceptible to revision on empirical grounds has many roots, including the work of W. V. Quine and the foundational studies of Hans Reichenbach.
W. V. Quine What is the epistemological status of the laws of logic? What sort of arguments are appropriate for criticising purported principles of logic? In his seminal paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," the logician and philosopher W. V. Quine argued that all beliefs are in principle subject to revision in the face of empirical data, including the so-called analytic propositions. Thus the laws of logic, being paradigmatic cases of analytic propositions, are not immune to revision. To justify this claim he cited the so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Birkhoff and von Neumann proposed to resolve those paradoxes by abandoning the principle of distributivity, thus substituting their quantum logic for classical logic. Quine did not at first seriously pursue this argument, providing no sustained argument for the claim in that paper. In Philosophy of Logic (the chapter titled "Deviant Logics"), Quine rejects the idea that classical logic should be revised in response to the paradoxes, being concerned with "a serious loss of simplicity", and "the handicap of having to think within a deviant logic". Quine, though, stood by his claim that logic is in principle not immune to revision.
Hans Reichenbach Hans Reichenbach considered one of the anomalies associated with quantum mechanics, the problem of complementary properties. A pair of properties of a system is said to be complementary if each one of them can be assigned a truth value in some experimental setup, but there is no setup which assigns a truth value to both properties. The classic example of complementarity is illustrated by the double-slit experiment in which a photon can be made to exhibit particle-like properties or wave-like properties, depending on the experimental setup used to detect its presence. Another example of complementary properties is that of having a precisely observed position or momentum. Reichenbach approached the problem within the philosophical program of the logical positivists, wherein the choice of an appropriate language was not a matter of the truth or falsity of a given language – in this case, the language used to describe quantum mechanics – but a matter of "technical advantages of language systems". His solution to the problem was a logic of properties with a three-valued semantics; each property could have one of three possible truth-values: true, false, or indeterminate. The formal properties of such a logical system can be given by a set of fairly simple rules, certainly far simpler than the "projection algebra" that Birkhoff and von Neumann had introduced a few years earlier.
First article: Hilary Putnam
In his paper "Is Logic Empirical?" Hilary Putnam, whose PhD studies were supervised by Reichenbach, pursued Quine's idea systematically. In the first place, he made an analogy between laws of logic and laws of geometry: at one time Euclid's postulates were believed to be truths about the physical space in which we live, but modern physical theories are based around non-Euclidean geometries, with a different and fundamentally incompatible notion of straight line. In particular, he claimed that what physicists have learned about quantum mechanics provides a compelling case for abandoning certain familiar principles of classical logic for this reason: realism about the physical world, which Putnam generally maintains, demands that we square up to the anomalies associated with quantum phenomena. Putnam understands realism about physical objects to entail the existence of the properties of momentum and position for quanta. Since the uncertainty principle says that either of them can be determined, but both cannot be determined at the same time, he faces a paradox. He sees the only possible resolution of the paradox as lying in the embrace of quantum logic, which he believes is not inconsistent.
Quantum logic
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
