If I were to ask how we justify the idea that logic works for reaching truth or that it is the only standard to measure truth, what would be a good answer? Would that answer be using logic? Would this not be circular? As in the same way that I might say that a book content is true because the book says so? But it is even more severe than our hypothetical because logic is always presupposed in any attempt to question it which makes the circularity even more vicious. And if we are not to use logic to justify that, what would we use to reason about that? It seems that there needs to be another way to think of it maybe by appealing to the impossibility of the contrary but what if we live in that impossible world? And of course we don’t but appealing to the impossibility of the contrary doesn’t free us from the question of what makes the use and efficiency of logic possible.
Let us examine first what is at stake exactly in this issue: it is the whole body of mathematics and by consequence all physics which stands on it, and every engineering discipline that stands on the physics and even in the most basic level our mundane conversation with other people; the guarantee that there is common understanding when we utter a word that signifies to an object which is agreed upon by our interlocutor by which I mean language.
Why Logic Cannot Justify Itself
Most common attempts to answer this problem present unsatisfactory or dismissive answers of which the most obnoxious is “it just works” or “it just is” which are not even answers worthy of being called philosophical. First if we were to say this we would need a standard of what it means to say “is” or in other words being itself and to provide a standard of what it means for something to “work” or in other words what is practical, both of which will require logic once again to explain, by which I mean a grounding of logic must be prior to logic not posterior to it. Since a lot of pragmatic approaches though commendable for their simplicity of answer and the priority which they give to practicality, they do not give any satisfactory or functional answers to such fundemental questions especially ones that are not in themselves tangible but rather are abstract.
Another thing is for certain, is that our answer for justifying logic should not lead to the self-destruction of logic as would materialism or empiricism for instance since logic would definitely not be a material object nor is it a thing we observe empirically, and making an exception for logic being of that which is different from the material and rules over the material would be like putting up logic as transcendent first principle, a position that logic does not fully fulfill and is an arbitrary dichotomy in essence.
By the virtue of having no alternative our thinking has logic as unavoidable and we cannot coherently conceive of the opposite but the issue at heart is where does it stand in our epistemology and how you or I see logic will affect our conclusions and interpretations of everything else in the world, in a way that framework-free observation and self-evident truths that are accessible to everyone in the same way is not as evident as we might think, in fact there are none.
This also points to the futility of autonomous mode of rationalism where logic is taken for granted as that would not lead to conclusive answers to anything, since if different people have different starting point they would reach different equally logically invincible positions.
Beyond Logic Alone
Although this type of argument is that of radical skeptics, I reject their views on truth since they are self-refuting in their analysis of the problem given their conclusion of epistemic nihilism.
What I would take away as conclusions from the whole issue is that logic itself is not the only epistemic tool, and there must be part of an array of other criteria or be subordinate to a higher faculty–something that is properly metaphysical although this might sound like a slur to materialist–since otherwise the result would be that of an unending philosophical maze, which in my opinion is what is manifested in the western philosophical tradition. Also that both the foundationalists have a point and the coherentists also have a point but not one fully to the exclusion of the other.
Though this itself requires a thorough elaboration, which I will hopefully deal with on other occasions since it is definitely not a simple problem to tackle philosophically.
This was a brief prompter to contemplate, think and examine the matter and its implications and whether the resulting world-view would cohere well with logic.