If I were to ask how do we justify the idea that logic works for reaching 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 thus ? 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 ?
But 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.
So that out of the way let us examine some common attempts, most of which present unsatisfactory or dismissive answers of which the most obnoxious is “it just works” or “is just is” which are not even answers worthy of being called by the name of philosophy, 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, 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 godlike being, a position that logic does not fully fulfill and is an arbitrary dichotomy in essence.
Now to clarify, 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.
This was a brief prompter to the ones who read this to contemplate and think and examine the matter and whether their worldview coheres well.