Words of Power

As a part-time, occasional university teacher and full time software developer who has taught logic, I found Ms Nye's work very useful in livening up my classes. It is a shame that it does not seem to be available. Nye's thesis: the actual praxis of logic has been a struggle for power between men and not a disinterested search for truth. It will be said by many philosophers that she is doing history...not logic. However, a reading of Indian indicates to me two interesting facts. The first is that only in the western tradition do philosophers suppose that logic can be studied out of context. Indian logicians appear to emphasise the importance of context: in their tradition (according to my limited understanding) you do not introduce the axiom "when there's smoke, there's fire" without illustrating its context as in "when there's smoke, there's fire, as in the kitchen." In the western tradition, this is marginalia. This is probably why logic seems so dry and so difficult and why its anhedonic (anti-pleasure) nature instills an unacknowledged anger in its mostly male followers...an anger which Ms Nye shows resulted in debates that were more struggles for power than searches for truth, and which also result in Internet "flame" wars and the obscenities of modern American politics. Ms Nye recommends in place of logic training in reading and in listening. I used her suggestions in a recent class in a working-class university, to I hope positive effect. The traditional philosophical riposte to her desire to replace formal logic by the apparently woolier skills of reading and listening is that reading and listening depends for coherence and understanding on logic itself, and this is supposed to show that logic itself is logically prior to reading and listening. I first saw this riposte used by my old and honored teacher, E. D. Klemke, in a debate in 1969 with Northwestern's Henry Veatch: Veatch claimed that there are "two logics." In "proving" that "there is one and only one logic, and I am its prophet", Klemke showed that the logic of reading and listening depends, on his view, on such propositions as p v ~p (any statement is true or false)...part of logic. This seemed to me at the time conclusive, and I thought of it when I read Nye in 1990: but further reading in deconstruction and critical theory has persuaded me of a different way out of the impasse presented by professors Klemke and Veatch in 1969. This is seen in the keyword "logically prior": if what is at issue is the status of logic, then Veatch and later Nye are not the only ones committing the fallacy of petitio principii when they unconsciously use the logic reified by Bertrand Russel as p v ~P: for the very effort to determine the logical priority assumes that logical priority exists and is a Good Thing. Derrida shows us a way out of this impasse by deconstructing the folly of attempting to categorize language into speech and writing, and prioriti