EvoLogic · The Evolution of Logic
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-02-01 → 2025-01-31
- EU contribution
- €173,847
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Evolution of Logic
We are the reasoning animal. Failure to reason with logic can undermine scientific research, policy making, and daily life. Like all animals, we evolved during a long natural process. Unlike other animals, we developed sophisticated minds and a complex language that contains logical structure. Noam Chomsky remarked, in 'Language and Problems of Knowledge' (1980) that "The logical notions are embedded in our deepest nature, in the very form of our language and thought" (p. 99). Yet it is remarkably unclear how we came to develop this amazing cognitive ability. How did logic become part of the natural world? Recent years have seen terrific developments in evolutionary linguistics, and in our understanding of logic. By bringing together these two areas of inquiry, the project EVOLOGIC has pioneered an underexplored research area. The first goal is to explain how the evolution of logic is even possible: a venerable tradition in philosophy holds that mathematical notions belong to the unchanging realm of forms --- how can Plato be reconciled with Darwin? The second goal is more technical: can we adopt various modeling techniques that have been developed for the study of language and cognitive evolution at large, to the specific purpose of the study of the evolution of logic? Some questions raised in this second part of the project are questions of logicality (What makes the logical expressions special?) and universality (What properties are characteristic of logical expressions?). These are questions about the limits of our ability to reason.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Our ability to reason by logic is exceptional in nature. We are the reasoning animal. Like all animals, we evolved during a long natural process. Unlike other animals, we developed sophisticated minds and a complex language that contains logical structure. Yet it is remarkably unclear how logic became part of nature. Where does logic come from? The goal of this project is to understand the origins of the human capacity for logical reasoning. Merging philosophical logic and evolutionary linguistics, the general hypothesis is that logic evolved to support social interactions and efficient communication. The particular focus will be on the evolution of quantificational reasoning, which is key to the ability to generalize and to count. There are three parts to this project. First, to explain what we have: the grammar of natural language includes simple words to express quantification ('every', 'always'). What were the conditions for the emergence of the cognitive abilities thereby manifested in speech? Second, to explain what we don't have: no language of the world includes simple words for concepts such as 'not every' and 'not always'. These quantifiers have to be expressed compositionally, by combining simpler building blocks ('not' with 'every' and 'often'). This is not a coincidence: the difference between what can be expressed as a lexical item and what must be expressed by composition is the difference between what can be memorized by the child acquiring a language, and what must be generated by the grammatical engine. Third, to explain how it all comes together: is logic the result of natural selection, cultural inheritance, or something else? The study of logic from an evolutionary perspective will provide a window into the origins of the human mind, with a wide-ranging impact on philosophy and neighboring disciplines.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN · PlaneggCoordinatorGermany
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101064835
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e508615e35&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union