Bryson Brown

This chapter attempts to trace in some detail the decision-making process pertaining to the abolition of the British slave trade as debated in the British Parliament in the years 1788 to 1807. It applies to the logic of rules to identify the rules at issue and the quandaries generated by them; then it applies it again to the deliberations of the people — British MPs in this period — who consciously dealt with the quandaries. Thus, this is the fullest use of the logic illustrated in the book, a use that stands on the frontier of much more elaborate applications, though this is a frontier that calls now for joint activity by philosophers and historians, rather than further illustrative activity on our part. Another way of expressing the distinctive nature of the chapter is to say that in it we are concerned not just with quandaries and changes in rules, but with issue-processing.

The logic of rules that has emerged from this project has been set forth and shown at work in the applications from which some of its chief features have derived. This chapter addresses the following questions: What has been accomplished? What are the prospects for future work, at once on the logic and on its applications? Though the two subjects, in retrospect and equally in prospect, go hand in hand, the first is discussed with an emphasis on the logic and the second with emphasis on the applications.

This chapter applies the logic to give an account of how changes in rules are deliberated, which is often the route by which changes in settled social rules come in. It applies a rules-analysis to the relation between the Constitution and the operation of factions or parties. Rules-analysis will be used not just to express the intentions that Madison and others acted upon and invoked in their arguments, but also to express intentions that they forswore, and thus set forth a comparison of some significance, which raises important questions for historians: Why did Madison and the others consider some alternatives and reject them? Why did they omit to consider yet others?

The preceding chapters showed how our logic can identify more precisely the rules prevailing in the _status quo ante_ and the rules supplanting them in the _status quo post_. It was also shown how the logic can identify what difficulties beset the former rules that the latter ones escape. This chapter advances to an application wherein the process of change itself is tracked in detail and comes to close grips with several quandaries. It presents Foucault's general account of the origin of clinical medicine. It then offers a rules-analysis of certain topics selected from that account as having central importance.

This chapter, as in the two chapters preceding, focuses on the basic task of demonstrating to historians that rules as we understand them in our logic are the same things — formulated more explicitly, in a logically standard or ‘canonical’ language — as the rules that historians themselves deal with. Along with this, again, it seeks to show that formulating them more explicitly encourages more precision in treating them; and thus raises questions that, pursued to the end, advance historical enquiry. The chapter, however, notably extends the reach of its illustrations. Marriage and property, the subjects of the two chapters preceding, are important institutions, central to defining cultures and social structures. The last chapter connected the rules governing property and changes in them with large processes of social change. In this chapter, such processes are taken up on the high ground of the Marxist dialectic of history. It shows how some sense can be made of the dialectic if it is treated as concerned with changes in rules made explicit as our logic would make them. In particular, it draws again upon our logic for a notion of ‘quandary’, which functions like the notion of ‘contradiction’, cited in the dialectic, to create an occasion for social change, even inevitable social change.

This chapter, which incorporates some results of a preliminary study by Bryson Brown, undertakes to formalize the rules at issue in some of the statements about social change contained in two accounts of the history of marriage and the family: Lawrence Stone's _The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800_ and Alan Macfarlane's _Marriage and Love in England_. The aim is to demonstrate that Stone and those who argue with him are discussing social rules as our formulations understand them. If Stone (and Macfarlane) have seemed to some historians to be much more schematic than most in their approach to history, that makes them all the more suitable for our purposes of illustration.

Once caught up in the dispute between Stone and Macfarlane about changes in British marriage, we shall not let the disputants go until we have dealt with another subject in dispute between them that is linked to Macfarlane's interpretation of Marx. Macfarlane argues that Stone's account of the history of marriage and the family in England is flawed because the historical data for the period that concerns Stone do not support the large-scale transformations that he posits. Macfarlane identifies the problem here as Stone's acceptance of Marx's (later Weber's) account of the evolution of English society from a peasant economy to a capitalist one. Macfarlane contends that these changes did not take place during the time-period delimited by Marx. Evolution of the concept of property is central to both Macfarlane's and Marx's accounts of the social transformation at issue; consequently this chapter formulates changing conceptions of property as social rules and in so doing reveals that Marx and Macfarlane are working with different notions of property, and different notions about the relation of property to individualism.

The account of the logic of rules is stratified. The various layers consist of the logic of states, i.e., essentially classical logic (of the usual sort), the logic of agents and action types (or as we call them routines), and the logic of rules proper, as the top layer. It is assumed that the reader has an adequate grasp of classical logic, either from the hydroplane tour in the last chapter, or from previous exposure to the material. This chapter concentrates on those features of our logic with which the reader is unlikely to have had any previous contact. Topics discussed include action theory, the logic of rules, semantics of rules, the structure of the set of rules, and goal theory.

This chapter lays out the ingredients of the logic in which the account of rules is to be formalized, and says something about its genesis. We assume no great proficiency with matters of formal science, but neither do we deny that a certain amount of goodwill, or at least patience, will be required of those who are new to the subject, or those whose formerly robust understanding of symbolic material has become somewhat withered by time. Most of the notation used is standard. Objects with which the formal theory deals are categorized as follows: sentences, individuals, predicates, routines, and rules. Also, the language in the theory is described (especially its semantics) and makes use of the vocabulary of set theory. The chapter explains these categories in more detail and then briefly annotates the set theoretic notions used.

The previous chapter specified the three features of rules that will be used throughout the study: _volk_ (demographic scope), _wenn_ (conditions of operation), and _nono_. The _nono_ component, which is sometimes referred to as ‘the burden’, targets the routines (the sequences of actions) that, given the other features of the rule in question, the rule prohibits. Leaving rules undefined, and relying on an intuitive grasp of what they are, we could treat them as just things that have those three features, which we would concentrate upon, without prejudice to others (like the authorities that may be the sources of the rules). We would then also be treating them without prejudice to there being definitions of rules other than the one offered in this chapter.

This introductory chapter begins by explaining how our logic requires us to put a rule into a form with three places to fill out: _volk_, _wenn_, and _nono_. These have to do with the demographic scope of the rule in question (the _volk_, pronounced ‘folk’); the specification of the actions prohibited (the _nono_, pronounced with a slight pause between the syllables); and, in between, with the conditions under which those specified actions are prohibited (the _wenn_, German for ‘if’, pronounced in German ‘ven’, but also suitably understood as ‘when’). The chapter then discusses the scope for application of logic in history, the benefits of logic and notation, the benefits of application, tracking deliberated change in issue processing, undeliberated changes in rules, and technically fully expressed rules and cultural universals.

This chapter examines the status of the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) by means of an examination of the epistemology of logic. It argues that reasoning that tolerates contradictions, in the sense of not trivializing their consequences, need not involve a commitment to their possible truth or correct assertability, because the consequence relations that we find in dialetheic logics can be captured by preservationist logics, logics that do not preserve truth from left to right of the turnstile, but some other (cognitively valuable) feature of premise sets. An examination of the aims of logical theorizing and the threat of under-determination leads to the conclusion that, just as Euclid's parallel postulate is not an invariant for empirically adequate applied geometries, the status of LNC is unlikely to be an invariant shared by all tenable logical theories.

Brown (1999) applied preservationist ideas to generate consequence relations first exploited by relevance and dialetheic logicians. The central lesson of the paper was that a systematic application of ambiguity can produce consistent images of inconsistent premise sets, allowing us to systematically constrain the consequences that can be inferred from them. Here we present several different ways to apply ambiguity and the preservation of ambiguity measures to obtain paraconsistent logics. The first uses ambiguity to project consistent images of inconsistent premise sets. The second shifts the focus from the syntactic to the semantic, allowing some atoms to receive ambiguous assignments, i.e. assignments that differ from instance to instance. Finally, the third extends the second with a simple game that captures the consequence relation of first degree entailment, dealing symmetrically with triviality on the right as well as the left. The chapter ends with the observation that preservation of a consequence relation under a range of images offers a new way of applying the general theme of preservationism to produce new (and sometimes better behaved) consequence relations.

“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascod, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose date” (Thomas Huxley (1869) Geological Reform, Presidential Address to the Geological Society). Reasoning in science is a rich and complex phenomenon. On one hand, we find detailed, sophisticated and rigorous calculations. But on the other, we encounter a multiplicity of models and approximations whose status has been the subject of extensive debate (See [6] How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press) and [7] The Dappled World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)). Detailed and demanding calculations give the appearance of mathematical rigour, and from a practical perspective, inferences and calculations based on successful models have proven to be reliable guides to our world, predicting the results of many measurements and suggesting interventions in the world that produce startling and impressive novel phenomena ranging from laser light to transistors to monoclonal antibodies and new types of sub-atomic particles. But the logical incompatibility of different models, each making different assumptions and approximations, together with the application of distinct, conflicting models in the course of deriving important results, raise serious questions about the nature and status of the both the premises and the conclusions of scientific reasoning.

This chapter examines the status of the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) by means of an examination of the epistemology of logic. It argues that reasoning that tolerates contradictions, in the sense of not trivializing their consequences, need not involve a commitment to their possible truth or correct assertability, because the consequence relations that we find in dialetheic logics can be captured by preservationist logics, logics that do not preserve truth from left to right of the turnstile, but some other (cognitively valuable) feature of premise sets. An examination of the aims of logical theorizing and the threat of under-determination leads to the conclusion that, just as Euclid's parallel postulate is not an invariant for empirically adequate applied geometries, the status of LNC is unlikely to be an invariant shared by all tenable logical theories.

In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume wrote a long section titled “Of skepticism with regard to the senses.” The discussion examines two key features of our beliefs about the objects making up the external world: 1. They continue to exist, even when unperceived. 2. They are distinct from the mind and its perceptions. The upshot of the discussion is a graceful sort of intellectual despair:I cannot conceive how such trivial qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can ever lead to any solid and rational system... ’Tis a gross illusion to suppose, that our resembling perceptions are numerically the same; and ’tis this illusion, which leads us into the opinion, that these perceptions are uninterrupted, and are still existent, even when they are not present to the senses. This is the case with our popular system. And as to our philosophical one, ’tis liable to the same difficulties; and is over-and-above loaded with this absurdity, that it at once denies and establishes the vulgar supposition. (Treatise, 217-8)These notes examine the argument of this section of the Treatise in detail. The upshot is that Hume’s despair is founded on an error. The notes finish by drawing some lessons about the epistemology of our common-sense world view.