Is Logic Empirical?

"Is logic empirical?" is the title of two articles (by Hilary Putnam and Michael Dummett) that discuss the idea that the algebraic properties of logic may, or should, be empirically determined; in particular, they deal with the question of whether empirical facts about quantum phenomena may provide grounds for revising classical logic as a consistent logical rendering of reality. The replacement derives from the work of Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann on quantum logic. In their work, they showed that the outcomes of quantum measurements can be represented as binary propositions and that these quantum mechanical propositions can be combined in much the same way as propositions in classical logic. However, the algebraic properties of this structure are somewhat different from those of classical propositional logic in that the principle of distributivity fails.

The idea that the principles of logic might be susceptible to revision on empirical grounds has many roots, including the work of W.V. Quine and the foundational studies of Hans Reichenbach.