The foundation of understanding
Aristotle made unprecedented contributions to all categories of knowledge, but perhaps his greatest gifts came from his examinations of the foundation of “knowledge,” itself. In other words, in the absence of some external authority, such as Plato’s Realm of True Forms which Aristotle rejected, how can human beings “know things.”
The philosopher asserted that the basis of knowledge (episteme) lay with an examination of everything – matter, living things, social orders – so as to discover basic facts, and then use those facts to make deductions firmly founded in those facts. This relied upon the rigid discipline of logic, and Aristotle was the first philosopher in history to subject logic, itself to rational analysis.
As a result of his examinations, which appear in his work, Posterior Analytics, Aristotle established the rational “rules” by which logic must operate.
(I found this topic pretty arcane, and have spent a reasonably chunk of the past several weeks just getting caught up on things. That’s one reason I had such a huge gap between posts. Other reasons included the loss of one job, the need to find another, as well as a modicum of family drama – all of which, when combined with the complexity of this topic, quite frankly resulted in some motivational challenges.)
As with everything, Aristotle’s analysis of the nature and functionality of logic was bounded by the limits of his time and circumstances, which is why more recent philosophers have managed to poke holes in its structure. However, some of those critiques come under a fair amount of criticism, themselves, from those who argue that the flaws perceived in Aristotle’s logic come from misinterpretation of what he wrote.
I don’t know enough about the arcane intricacies of modern critiques of Aristotelian logic to have an opinion as to their validity. What I do know is that Aristotle was the first to subject the operation of logic to systemic analysis, and he was the first to treat logic as a topic of rigorous study, in its own right.
Despite any flaws it may have, the study of logic and rules by which it operated allowed him to lay a solid foundation for the development of scientific thought, and his discipline use of logic and his application of it to all fields of study cause many to name Aristotle as the first true scientist.
Aristotle wrote that knowledge lay in the search for facts about everything. He said all knowledge fell into 10 categories (Aristotle loved categorizing everything, and the need to find the correct category to assign led him to examine the nature of logic, in the first place). The 10 categories are “Substance” (“this” or “what it is”, for example, something is a “man” or a “horse” or a “stone” or a “plant,” etc); Quantity (“how much”; for example, “six” or “10 feet long” or a “ton”); Quality (“what sort”; for instance, “a white thing” or “a black thing” or “literate”); Relation (“related to something else”; for instance, “double” or “half” or “greater” or “lesser” than some other thing); Location (“where”; for instance, “in the marketplace” or “in the harbor”); Time (“when” it is; for instance, “last year” or “yesterday”); Position (“being situated”; for instance, “stands” or “sits”); Habit (an observable trait something “has” or possesses; for instance, “is tanned” or “is strong”); Action (what something is “actively doing”; for instance, “it runs” or “it walks”); and “Passion (“what is being done to something”; it is “being cut” or it is “being burned”).
When one assigns something to each of the categories, the assignation must be based in the observed facts about each thing. Each of those facts then becomes a “premise” by which one can make logical deductions, in a form we now call a “logical syllogism.”
Each logical syllogism, when properly constructed, has a major premise and a minor premise. If both premises are factual, then the deduction based on those premises (the syllogism, itself), must be true.
As an example, Aristotle provided a syllogism that has become famous throughout history:
Major Premise: All men are mortal.
Minor Premise: Socrates is a man.
Deduction: Socrates is mortal.
In this famous syllogism, both premises are demonstrably factual. There is no doubt that all men are mortal, because nobody has ever found a man who isn’t, and therefore it is illogical to assume that immortal men exist. That Socrates was a man is irrefutable – lots of people described him as such, and even those who hated him agreed as to his sex. Ergo, Socrates was mortal, as his death by hemlock demonstrated.
Aristotle also went to great pains to examine the nature of “facts,” since the entire structure of logic relied on the ability of human beings to identify what is and what is not “factual.” To Aristotle, our ability to understand fact lay in our peculiar status as beings capable of reason – a quality not possessed by any other being. That ability to reason operated in much the same way as our five senses, Aristotle argued, and had innate qualities we had no choice but to recognize as present.
For instance, he noted that, even if a human being grew up and never saw the color red, the human eye (when functioning properly) remained capable of seeing the color red, and when a person saw a red thing for the first time (assuming his eyes didn’t have the flaw called “color-blindness”), he or she could recognize it as distinct from any other color. The capacity to see the color “red” was an innate quality of human eyes the functioned properly – just as human touch was capable of sensing “soft” or “hard” or “smooth” or “rough”; and the sense of taste could distinguish “sour” or “sweet” or “salty.”
In the same way, Aristotle argued, human reason was capable of perceiving “fact” and “falsehood,” even if someone were never raised with any sort of formal schooling. The capacity for reason is innate to every person, the philosopher said, and our ability to reason not only made human beings unique, but it provided insight into our reason for being.
That said, Aristotle argued that one couldn’t simply assume that deductions that seemed logical on the surface had any validity. In all cases, he said, the inquiring mind needed to examine whether or not the premises met the standard of fact. He also noted that, in order for us to recognize the validity of a given premise, we had to be able to explain why that premise applied to that deduction.
To do that, Aristotle said, we had to understand the cause why something is, that it demonstrably caused the phenomenon in question, and that no other explanation could possibly apply. In other words, to Aristotle, all proper knowledge is the knowledge of causes, and that means all premises must appear primary to the deduction, directly and immediately to that deduction, with no intermediate steps along the way.
Now, as I understand it, a lot of people raise objections to Aristotle’s definition, and modern scientific analysis actually functions rather differently because of the flaws in his analytical structure. However, the fact that Aristotle devoted so much time and energy to the examination of logic, and its operation, raised the bar and forced critics to really think hard to poke holes in the structure he devised.
That said, Aristotle’s emphasis on the primacy of fact, and the need to demonstrate causation (despite the flaws), lay the foundation for modern science. The need to examine each premise so as to validate its factual nature made it imperative to dig into everything humans think they know. It forced Aristotle and his successors to discover whether or not something was actually true, and genuinely related to the effects described.
Essentially, the need to understand causation forced his fellow philosophers to begin to question everything they thought they knew about reality.
The need to “get it right,” also required that Aristotle examine all the myriad ways that human beings get things wrong. To do this, Aristotle examined what he called “sophistical arguments,” or those which apparently supported their conclusions, but in actuality fell apart when subjected to rigorous examination.
The “sophistical arguments” fell into two general categories. In these particular syllogisms the conclusions appear to follow of necessity to the premises, but in reality they actually don’t. For instance, one could say:
Major Premise: All domestic animals are useful
Minor Premise: All housecats are domestic animals.
Deduction: All housecats are useful.
The premises both seem to say true things, but the deduction is demonstrably false (not all housecats are useful – some do nothing at all, are so ill-tempered they don’t even provide pleasure to their owners, and therefore drain resources while providing very little in the way of usefulness). This particular example demonstrates the sort of flawed understanding of causation that, while on the surface seems to support a deduction, in actuality reflects a fundamentally inaccurate and inadequate understanding of reality.
The second sophistical argument has a flaw that is much more subtle – it is one in which the premises seem to be acceptable, at first glance, but really are not, and therefore result in flawed deductions. Once again, the classic example goes as follows:
Major Premise: Whatever you have not lost, you still have.
Minor Premise: You have not lost horns.
Deduction: You still have horns.
In that particular example, the Major Premise seems pretty straightforward and true. It’s only when we dig into it that we realize it has serious flaws and, as such, supports an invalid conclusion.
The Posterior Analytics goes on for pages and pages of proofs that support the structure of Aristotle’s logic and, as noted, it took (literally) thousands of years before people started to poke hole in it. However, the structure was so solid, for so long, that once the flaws began to be noticed, the need to address them led to the creation of logical structures that were even more robust.
Still, whether one follows the Aristotelian system (and many still do), or adheres to one of the newer systems of logic, all conclusions in any of them depend on the validity of the fundamental premises. No matter how logical the structure, if the edifice of understanding is based on flawed premises, the entire structure will inevitably crumble.
That quest for first causes – the most fundamental of facts from which we can form valid premises — continues today. Even though the methodology modern scientists utilize differs substantially from Aristotle’s approach, investigations into the fundamental nature of physical reality – such as ongoing efforts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN), traces its efforts to arguments by Aristotle of absolute necessity of understanding “first causes.”
Aristotle’s efforts to subject the structure of logic, itself, to rational analysis and systemic study was unprecedented. Not only did it set us on the path that eventually led to our modern understanding of scientific reasoning, it also forced his successors to ask hard questions about how we know that what we know is actually true and valid – the central questions in the field of epistemology.
Sources
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/posterior.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/#H3
http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/37/logic-deductive-and-inductive/464/chapter-9/
http://logic.umwblogs.org/ (image source)