General Overview (2)

2. Explanation

2.1 The scope of logic

Logic is about proceeding "with order, easily, and without error" in reasoning. The first two qualifications refer to thought itself, whereas the last regards its relation to reality.

"With order" refers to the correct order of our thoughts, which should not follow the suggestions of imagination, but obey the demands of rigor proper to thought itself. Logic looks therefore to form valid reasonings, then to follow the due order in such reasonings. From this habitual order of our thoughts will follow an ease in dealing with more arduous intellectual problems, beginning and ending as they ought, let alone the correctness of the reasonings which lead to their solution.

But all this would be vain if our mind were to move outside of reality. In fact, what one wants to reach by exercising his reason is nothing other than the truth, which is a conformity between thought and thing: adaequatio rei et intellectus. Logic is therefore ultimately ordered to uncovering the true and therefore, correlatively, the identification of error.

Synthetically, logic is an intrument designed to order reasonings to discover the truth.