ABSTRACT

Concept, judgment, and syllogism have perennially occupied a preeminent position in the annals of logic. Usually, they have reigned as the privileged elements of a formal logic, where, allegedly, they provide the anatomy of thinking no matter what content thought conceives. If logic is to fulfill its generic task of conceiving valid thinking, however, it cannot be a formal science. Far from engaging a thinking indifferent to all content, logic must validly conceive a very specific content, namely, valid thinking itself. Logic will thereby differ from all other disciplines by possessing a content that cannot diverge from the form by which it is thought. Since non-logical sciences address a subject matter different from valid thinking, the method by which their topic is properly ordered cannot be what they investigate. These other sciences must therefore presuppose their method as either a dogmatic assumption or as the result of some separate investigation of method proper.