[claudiawerner]

Of course, though my point was about the term "logic" in general rather than "formal logic". I am happy to say that Hegel's logic isn't a formal logic, but it's not exactly what we know to be "informal logic" either (i.e arguments and fallacies). Funnily enough, a Boolean opposition between formal and informal logic doesn't seem to include the full range of possible values...

[YorkshireSeason]

Nobody has a monopoly of meaning.

Ultimately meaning closely tracks use. But if you want to maximise the probability of being understood, then it's wise to use a term in the way that the audience you are talking to is using it. And on a comp-sci centric site like Hacker News, that means to understand "logic" in the sense of formally valid truth-preserving inferences. All the more so since the post I was replying to, and my own clearly were arguing about formal logic.

As an aside, there have been attempts at formalising logical approaches a little more in the tradition of Hegel [1], maybe started in earnest by Paul Lorenzen. But this only got real traction in the 1990s with Girard's linear logic [2] game semantics of logic [3]. The tradition of game semantics is firmly within the Fregean tradition of logic as formal logic.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-dialogical/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_logic

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_semantics

[claudiawerner]

I've made myself understood using "logic" (as in a logic) a few times on Hacker News, for instance "the logic of capital" - nobody objected to this kind of usage. You made a link between understanding and the lack of the need to "learn" logic later in life - which ties in very well with what you might not have expected - Hegel's logic, which aims to deal with the intersection between logic and the movement of thought very closely. Implicitly there was the idea that classical logic represents how we use logic internally, which is a notion also firmly in the camp of continental logic theorists. So it's not relevant that you were talking about formal logic - after all, this site is for interesting things, not formal things.

I also think it's worth asking whether the formalization of Hegel's logic (or one similar to his, even superficially) can preserve the meaning. Hegel was famously against what he saw as the rise of mathematical formalism and its precursor, Greek and Latin terms, in new philosophical texts - because he didn't view our consciousness as being "at home" in such concepts. This is of course entangled with the critique of positivism and the reduction of concepts and scientific knowledge to formal logically linked facts. Already this definition of "logic" which you use to strictly only include Ferge and Russell's descendants shifts the conversation to a world in which the totality of things can be explained by this family of logics - after all, anything outside that would be "illogical". I'm not saying it's a deliberate move.

If the browsers of Hacker News are only able to understand a very limited definition of "logic" then perhaps it is good to broaden their minds.

Thank you for the first link in particular, even though it seems dialogical logic doesn't seem to capture some key Hegelian features, such as the uniqueness of the negation of the negation.

[YorkshireSeason]

> "the logic of capital"

There is no logic of capital. The context "of capital" disambiguates the phrase and makes it clear that the discussion is about a politics, and has about as much to do with logic as the holy roman empire was holy, roman, or an empire.

> Hacker News are only able to understand a very limited definition of "logic"

Why underestimate HN? Why not ask: how is using a word in non-standard meaning helping people's understanding?

As an aside, there's quite a few working logicians on HN, including two how have published on features of Hegel's conception of (what he called) logic, albeit filtered through Sellars and Brandom's Hegel reading.