Heidegger and Logic by Shirley Greg;

Author:Shirley, Greg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Inference and Lógos

Inference deserves its own discussion for several reasons. One reason already given is that it is one of the elements of categorical logic, and Heidegger offers a hermeneutics of categorical logic. Another reason is that inference is connected to truth, a central concept in both logic and Heidegger’s developing account of it. In categorical logic, validity is an inferential relationship between judgements regarding the transfer of truth from premises to conclusions. A theory of truth thus informs a theory of inference as validity, so it is necessary to look at how Heidegger’s hermeneutics of truth informs a hermeneutics of inference.1 A further reason is that in Heidegger’s scheme Dasein projects possibilities as consequences, and so exhibits a consequential structure in activity that is articulated formally in logic as inference. In the activity of drawing inferences, Dasein makes use of the available consequential structure of worldhood. Formal inference, or inference with respect to formal objects and their properties, is grounded in the pre-reflective consequential structure of the world, ground as such. The focus of the first half of this chapter is then Heidegger’s hermeneutics of inference as derivative of ground as consequence.

It becomes apparent that Heidegger’s discussion of ground is at the heart of his transcendental account of meaning as the practical lógos of being-in-the-world. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [Metaphysical Foundations of Logic] (MFL, 1928b) is particularly useful for understanding Heidegger’s hermeneutics of logic in that Heidegger explicitly states here the ‘basic problems of a philosophical logic’ requiring hermeneutical interpretation, and connects them to the central theme of BT, that the lógos of being is time. I have thus focused on the exposition of ground in MFL because it most explicitly connects ground, logic, and temporality.2 Since the lógos of being is time, logic as derivative normative meaning structure is grounded in the temporal structure of being-in-the-world, and so ultimately in original temporality/Temporalität. Logic is then grounded simultaneously in (i) ground, since the inferential structure of logic is grounded in the consequential structure of being-in-the-world, and (ii) lógos, since temporality provides the consequential structure of intelligibility for worldhood. Connecting inference and lógos by way of ground allows us then to make sense of Heidegger’s summary claim that ‘logic is the metaphysics of truth’. If logic is the metaphysics of truth as the normativity of disclosedness, grounded in lógos as temporality, then Heidegger identifies truth with lógos as temporality, uniting logic, truth, and radical metaphysics in a discussion of the unity and place of lógos in the BT scheme. The focus of the second half of this chapter is then lógos as temporality, and its connection to inference in the idea of logic as the metaphysics of truth. The hermeneutics of inference and its connection to lógos by way of ground completes Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic, and invites a motivating question for Chapter 4: what are the prospects for extending it to a hermeneutics of mathematical logic as well?

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