Is Logic Necessary?

Abstract“Logic” entails both a toolkit for dealing with situations requiring precision, and a prescription for a type of public reasoning. A sufficiently extended society facing a stream of genuinely novel opportunities and challenges will benefit from an ability to generate and encourage the use of such reasoning systems to deal with these opportunities and challenges. The study of “logic” is the result of using the toolkit on itself, which would appear to be a necessary and not unnatural step for a society developing sufficient familiarity with the toolkit. Many societies have developed something like logic, and past and present use of logic-like toolkits in learning situations and transmission of skills suggests that many societies will develop something like logic.