Chapter 1 - Logical realism

Summary

Logic might chart the rules of the world itself; the rules of rational human thought; or both. Husserl had a very broad concept of logic that embraces our usual modern idea of logic as well as something he called pure logic, which we can loosely characterise as something like the fundamental forms of experience. For Husserl, the fundamental forms of pure logic are an in-eliminable part of experience: i.e. experience encompasses direct apprehension of these inferential relationships. The apprehended structures are abstract and platonic; discovered, rather than constructed. Theory, empirical observation, and experience are in this sense fallible: they may or may not get it right and reveal the actual independent structure of logic. Both logic and mathematics as they are characterised by Husserl, should encounter the realist problem of independence, neither are the sort of thing we can simply take as part of human cognition.