2. Analytical Introduction (2)

Part 1: The necessity of logic

1.1 Preliminary notions

We ask ourselves if and how logic is necessary to reach scientific knowledge (in the Aristotelian sense here used), which is to say, as a preliminary sketch, an intellective organic knowing, excluding all error. Therefore let us clarify these three notions

a) Logic

Description (cf supra): Logic is the art that directs the act of reasoning itself in the search for truth.

Distinctions:
i) Natural logic is nothing other than the natural faculty of the intelligence of man, insofar as he is capable of reason.
ii) Scientific logic is a habit (habitus) added to the intelligence to complete its initial capacity to reason. By habit is meant a stable quality, disposing the subject to be good or bad or to act well or badly. An entitative habit perfects in the line of being (vg grace), while an operative habit perfects in the line of acting (vg the theological virtues)

b) Necessity

St Thomas defines necessity in this way:

The word “necessity” is employed in many ways. For that is necessary which cannot not be.
Now that a thing must be may belong to it by an intrinsic principle:

either material, as when we say that everything composed of contraries is of necessity corruptible

or formal, as when we say that it is necessary for the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles. And this is “natural” and “absolute necessity.”

In another way, that a thing must be, belongs to it by reason of something extrinsic, which is either the end or the agent.

On the part of the end, as when without it the end is not to be attained or so well attained: for instance, food is said to be necessary for life, and a horse is necessary for a journey. This is called “necessity of end,” and sometimes also “utility.”

On the part of the agent, a thing must be, when someone is forced by some agent, so that he is not able to do the contrary. This is called “necessity of coercion.” (I,82,1,c)

Notice that necessity of end is subdivided into necessity of strict end (food to live) and necessity of moral end (the means for a journey).


c) Scientific knowledge

Aristotelian definition: cognitio certa per causis (cf Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, A, 2, 71 b 9-11: We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is.)

Therefore, it is an intellective knowing which is:
i)certain, which is to say that it excludes the possibility that the contradictory could be true
ii)per causas, which is to say it goes beyond the pure phaenominality of the object to grasp its constitutive causes, or trace the properties of the object back to to their causes.

Distinctions to be made in view of resolving the current problem:
i) science in an imperfect state, or knowledge of the first conclusions of this science, deficient knowledge with regard to certitude and with regard to the demonstration of the more remote conclusions, and also the solution of objections;
ii) science in a perfect state, or knowledge which satisfies all the demands of the definition of science, and which can follow to the end the demonstrative process with due rigor, and also refute adversaries and resolve objections.