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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2018

Dialogues and Strategies in Aristotle’s Logic: Furthering Hintikka’s Insights

Résumé

In his 1997 reply to Woods and Hansen, “What was Aristotle Doing in His Early Logic, Anyway?”, Jaakko Hintikka clears some misunderstandings concerning his reconstruction, by means of an interrogative model, of Aristotle’s logic. He thus explicitly challenges some of the deep-rooted assumptions of Aristotelian scholars and modern logicians: Aristotle’s Analytics, asserts Hintikka, are not radically separated from his Topics and De Sophisticis Elenchis, but are rather the pursuit of the same goal at a different level, that of strategies, as opposed to down-to-earth — or “down-to-agora” as he says — dialectical bouts between individual, concrete opponents. Hintikka justifies the absence of an explicit question-and-answer framework in the Prior and Posterior Analytics by the strategic principle of anticipation of the answers to one’s questions: since the best strategic course of action in a game of questions and answers is to ask only those questions of which you can anticipate the answers, and for which the anticipated answers go your way, then, in a strategic perspective, one can actually do without an answerer. This would thus yield both the presentation of Aristotle’s syllogistic framework and Hintikka’s interrogative model of it. Two essential elements of Hintikka’s interpretation can thus be outlined: that Aristotle was first and foremost interested in question-and-answer inquiries and in this regard thought like a dialectician; and that this question-and-answer mold for reasoning could be made implicit through a strategic perspective. The purpose of this talk will be to uphold Hintikka’s perspective on Aristotelian logic, which is still not universally accepted among scholars, and further his insights by proposing a new logical framework in which the rules themselves are defined through questions and answers, or, as we call them, through challenges and defenses. The dialogical structure of the syllogisms should thus become apparent in the logical framework, with the added benefit that such a framework rests on a rule, the Socratic rule, that directly yields Hintikka’s distinction between a justification ad hominem, concerning only the dialectical bouts at the agora level, and a justification ad argumentum, which also concerns the strategy level. The path which will be tread in order to defend and illustrate Hintikka’s two tenets on Aristotelian logic will not be Hintikka’s own path consisting in making the interlocutor implicit, but will rather be the path consisting in making everything more explicit, enabling us to emphasize, in the logical framework itself, the structural link between syllogistics (Analytics) and dialectics (Topics), and to provide a logical rendering of the distinction between ad hominem and ad argumentum conclusions through the Socratic rule.
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halshs-04390820, version 1 (12-01-2024)

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Zoe Mcconaughey. Dialogues and Strategies in Aristotle’s Logic: Furthering Hintikka’s Insights. UNILOG, workshop "Hintikka's Logical Thought", Jean-Yves Béziau; Saloua Chatti, Jun 2018, Vichy, France. ⟨halshs-04390820⟩
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