Edited by Sofia Miguens and published in 2020 by Harvard University Press, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics is an imposing 1069-pages collection devoted to the problem of the possibility of illogical thought. Could we imagine beings who would reason according to logical principles contrary to ours? If so, would we still refer to what they are doing as thinking? Or would we refrain from qualifying the strings of sounds coming out of their mouths as an expression of thought?

What is at stake is indeed the very concept of thought itself, its limits and its grounds. Fundamental as it is, the problem runs through the history of modern philosophy from Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Frege to Wittgenstein, to mention only a few of the great minds of the past, right into the heart of contemporary debates. In current analytical philosophy, one major historical and theoretical contribution is indebted to James Conant, and in particular his 1991’s seminal paper “The search for logical alien thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus“. Reedited as the opening paper of The Logical Alien, it forms along with a series of eight critical comments as well as a particularly instructive introduction by Sofia Miguens and Charles Travis, the first of two parts of the volume. The second part is composed by Conant’s replies to his critics which offer at the same time a reassessment of his initial account, again admirably clearly and synthetically presented by Miguens.

The editorial work of the latter merits, for that matter, a special mention for the overall coherence given to an especially dense, complex and multi-tasking book, devoted to Conant who is himself a remarkably prolific and wide-ranging philosopher. Conant is indeed author of an impressive amount of papers spanning a large variety of philosophical domains (philosophy of logic, of language, of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, history of analytical philosophy, German idealism) and authors (Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege), although he is probably most known for his “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein, advanced partially in collaboration with Cora Diamond in the early 90s, and developed notably in the 1991-paper which The Logical Alien takes as it starting point. Conant’s resolute reading ascribes to Wittgenstein – and seemingly endorses with him – a vision of philosophy as an essentially elucidatory, rather than argumentative, enterprise. In sum, this means that the principal aim of philosophical activity is not to defend substantial theses, but to flush out the nonsense concealed in some of our apparently most redoubtable philosophical problems… such as that of the logical alien.

One of the originalities of Conant’s original paper is indeed to tackle the question about the possibility of illogical thought not by arguing for or against it, but by challenging the very sense of the envisaged scenario: is this really something that we can sensibly conceive of? Another merit of the paper is to do this by sketching out the historical roots of the problem, as it first appeared in the theologico-philosophical debate pertaining to the incompatibility between the necessity of the basic laws of logic governing our thinking on the one hand, with the omnipotence of God on the other, and by further showing how the alternative positions in the quarrel are structurally reproduced in 20th century debates, where faith in God is simply replaced by faith either in science or in logic, leaving the nub of the problem unresolved.

The structure of the problem is this. The laws of logic are generally thought to be necessary, or inexorable. Philosophers are then inclined to ask why this is so. What are the grounds for this necessity? What are the foundations of the laws of logic?

One option is to say that they are merely “contingently” necessary, as Conant puts it. That is, the laws of logic appear as necessary for us, because of our actual cognitive limitations, whether those limitations are imposed by an almighty God who could have chosen to make them otherwise (Descartes), or by the current state of scientific knowledge which we must admit could evolve in unexpected directions, eventually likely to require revisions of some of our basic principles of reasoning (contemporary empiricists, e.g. Quine and early Putnam). In opposition to this first view, which is psychologistic, there are those who think that (at least some of) the laws of logic are “necessarily” or “absolutely” necessary: they are not simply the reflections of the limitations of the human mind, but delimit the sphere of the thinkable as such (Aquinas, Leibniz, and more recently Putnam who at a later stage of his career argued that there is “at least one a priori truth” to be found in the principle of non-contradiction). However, as conflicting as they might seem, these views are, on Conant’s reading, simply different paths leading to the same dead-end. For they both deprive themselves of the possibility to establish rationally their own truth. In the first line of reasoning, the notion of truth is indeed relativized to what humans “take to be true”, by an unconditional deference to a superior yet (for us) incomprehensible authority (hence the fantasy of the logical alien), while the second is wrapped up in a circularity presupposing the very notion of necessity it is out to explain.

Turning to yet another tradition of thought, evolving from Kant through Frege to Wittgenstein, the core of Conant’s 1991-account consists in an attempt to overcome this apparently unsatisfying alternative, focusing primarily on the problems with psychologism. In this, Conant is sympathetic to the idea that the laws of logic are constitutive of the possibility of thought itself, an idea which he finds in the three authors that he discusses. But he refuses to think of this as containing implicitly an explanation or justification of any kind. There is no thinking outside the laws of logic, and this entails that there is no vantage point from which we can assess externally or transcendentally the principles underpinning our reasoning, and from which we could compare them to any alternative ways of thinking. This is why the idea of the logical alien, the hypothesis about a radically alternative logic, is a lure. For as Frege showed in his attack on psychologism (of which Conant offers a masterly and perhaps the most illuminating reconstruction there is) it is not clear how we could make sense of the sounds emitted by the so-called logical aliens and even less how we could see them as expressions of judgment following logical principles different from ours. The psychologistic logician, by grounding the laws of logic in our human habits of thinking, is yet committed to the intelligibility of this scenario. For there to be logical aliens, it suffices on his view for it to be beings whose habits of thinking are different from ours. But, following Frege, for the logical aliens to be truly logical aliens the psychologistic logician is in need of a concept of disagreement by means of which he could qualify their sayings not merely as noises which are different from those that we typically recognize as expressions of thought, but as a form of thinking which is in conflict with ours: “if the noises we and the aliens make merely differ from one another (…), then they are no more in disagreement with one another than the moos of two different cows” (p. 80). Recognizing something as an expression of thought and qualifying it as conflicting with other thoughts requires for Frege that there is an already settled shared logical framework. Yet it is precisely such a framework of which the psychologicistic logician has bereft himself. Thus, he could not make sense of the hypothesis of the logical alien, and this is supposed to bring out the extent to which his conception of the foundations of the laws of logic is confused and to highlight against it the central role of logic in constituting the possibility of thought and of rational discourse per se. 

Of course, this is not all that is going on in Conant’s paper, which is rich in theoretical and exegetical claims, notably concerning the continuities and discontinuities between Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein. The eight essays responding to the original paper engage both with the substantive question of the conditions of making sense, as well as with the evolution of the idea of logical necessity through the history of philosophy. They are judiciously arranged as to deal successively with different parts of Conant’s paper: Adrian Moore first disputes Conant’s reading of Descartes; Matthew Boyle then points out divergences between Kant and Frege which he think Conant underestimated; Arata Hamawaki addresses another but not unrelated paper of Conant’s on the differences between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism; Barry Stroud develops on the idea of the vacuity of the quest for grounds of logical necessity; and Peter Sullivan defends Frege against certain tensions in his account identified by Conant. The three last replies are concerned with later Wittgenstein, who is approached through the lens of Conant’s reading of the Tractatus (i.e. early Wittgenstein): Martin Gustafsson thus proposes to consider Wittgenstein’s recourse to the notion of grammatical rules (replacing that of logical laws in his later writings) as a tool of philosophical elucidation; Charles Travis is interested in the way Wittgenstein, in the different stages of his philosophical work, inherits Frege’s treatment of the distinction between objects and concepts; whereas Jocelyn Benoist discusses Wittgenstein’s explicit reactions to Frege’s logical alien. All in all, the replies reflect the breadth and fecundity of Conant’s initial account, which he subsequently prolongs, modifies and refines in a somewhat disconcerting “replies to my critics”-section. While the format adopted by The Logical Alien is well-known, Conant nevertheless makes an unusual move by construing his replies not to be read individually, but as to form a systematic whole. Running over two thirds of the volume, about 700 pages, this makes The Logical Alien a remarkable rarity or as Conant himself puts it “a particular beast” (p. 322) in an academic field where the privileged format of publication is short freestanding papers in peer-reviewed journals, in a tradition of analytical philosophy recurrently accused of ignoring its own origins. While being demanding reading, The Logical Alien successfully gets around these pitfalls by offering the opportunity both to follow the movements of a philosophical thought in all its nuances and subtleties, and to plunge into the historical sources of the problem addressed.

However, theoretical systematicity and historical depth aside, one could find regrettable the complete absence of any confrontation with concrete cases likely to defy the limits of our rational understanding. Admittedly, this is to be expected from a style of philosophizing which conceives its objective in terms of dismantling illusions inherent to theoretical thinking. For Conant, the logical alien is indeed a purely intra-philosophical figure. The point is clear already in his initial discussion of Frege, and it is further stressed in the second part of the volume when Conant specifies the three senses in which he think the expression is to be taken, as referring either 1) to other philosophers whose conceptions of logic are on some level profoundly distant to ours (e.g. when being merged with theological considerations which no longer has a natural part to play in our reflections on rationality), or 2) to the strange beings they set up in their thought experiments (God, evil demons, imaginary tribes with weird calculating or trading habits) or finally 3) to “the philosopher in each one of us” who “becomes a stranger to herself” when reflecting on the conclusions to be drawn from such philosophical fictions (p. 368). In the first case, Conant explains indeed that the sense of separateness is not unbridgeable, because with philosophers of the past, despite local divergences, there is a “background of commensurability” (p. 364), a shared set of common references against which such divergences are identifiable and assessable. In the second case, by contrast, we are dealing with figures set up precisely in order to lack any such common standard and for this reason, no overcoming our differences is to be expected, and in particular no substantive conclusion could be draw as to their form of thinking. Since we could not even identify what they are doing as thinking, the ultimate mistake, leading to Conant’s third sense of alientatedness, would be qualify it in terms of logic, and notably as logically primitive forms of thinking (whatever that might mean):

“On this third way of deploying the expression the ‘logical alien’, a philosopher who suffers from logical alienation is one who mistakes a case that suffers from logical privation – a logically alienated form of consciousness, or of the exercise of a cognitive capacity, or a form of human life – for the logically primitive form of the phenomenon under philosophical investigation” (p. 368, my emphasis).

For Conant, this says nothing about those who we are tempted to call logical aliens, but depict the state of mind of the philosopher who departing from the “conceptual landscape in which she is always ready at home” (p. 368) tries to understand what would require her to “jump out of her own skin”, to use Frege’s expression. Now, this intra-philosophical dimension notwithstanding, Conant yet leaves us with a general conception of the understanding of otherness, according to which we could not really understand forms of thinking which are truly different from ours, a conception which – in my sense – would merit to be tested against the ambiguities of real cases scenarios, say of radical scientific change, anthropological clashes of world views, or delusional discourse in psychiatric patients. Nowhere in the book the reader will find any elaborate examples of this kind. Perhaps one could reply that these are purely empirical issues, whose resolution could be nothing but empirical. It seems to me, however, that such a reply could not be held in a completely a priori fashion, on principle dispensing itself from rubbing itself to reality. The Logical Alien takes us on a fascinating and very stimulating journey “at the cuckoo corners at the edge of philosophy” (p. 1026), and this is already a lot. May it go on by including some real case scenarios at some of its stations.  

Rosanna Wannberg

Clinical psychologist, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, FRESH grant-holder, National Funds for Scientific Research (Belgium), Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris, France)

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: philosophy