Nikolai Vasiliev. Russian logician, philosopher, psychologist, medical doctor and symbolist poet. Precursor of paraconsistent logic and multiple values.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Childhood
- 2 Studies
- 3 Career path
- 4 Death
- 2 Contributions to logic
- 3 Influence of your studies
- 4 Works
- 5 Sources
Biographical synthesis
Childhood
Born on 29 June as as 1880 in Kazan, Russia . He grew up in an environment of research and science as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather excelled in mathematics , sinology, and astronomy respectively.
Studies
He wanted to be a psychologist and with this objective he entered the Faculty of Medicine in 1904 and two years later at the historical-philological faculty of the University of Kazan, where he was honored with the rank of candidate. Then he was offered the position of associate professor at the University itself. In his college student years, he became interested in symbolist-style poetry and published some books of verse.
Career path
At the beginning of World War I , he was drafted into the army and served as a field medic. The suffering of the injured caused a depression that triggered a serious mental illness. However, he managed to teach again at the University of Kazan, but had to be retired at only 42 years old because his ailment worsened. This caused him to spend most of the next 20 years in a psychiatric hospital. AND
Death
On December 31 of 1940a the age of 60 years died in his native Kazan. It is not known where he was buried.
Contributions to logic
He promoted the idea of the plurality of logics, by analogy with the plurality of systems of geometry .
“We get used to the idea of a single logic, the same for all, to the point of not being able to imagine anything to the contrary. However, this is only a psychological explanation of our certainty … We have become accustomed simply to believe in the uniqueness of logic … in the same way as a people on the primitive stage of cultural development believes that their language is the only possible one ”.
According to him, logic is made up of a constant and absolutely necessary nucleus of laws, which dominate mathematically, and of a changing set of logical laws dependent on the properties of things that are known. To make this delimitation, he reviewed the existing logical postulates. Thus, in the law of non-contradiction he highlighted two different meanings:
“The same judgment cannot be simultaneously true and false; if we renounce this law, logic becomes impossible because we are not able to distinguish truth from falsehood ”.
He called this conclusion the law of self-contradiction and classified it in metalogical, that is, among the mandatory laws for every thinking being, which cannot be removed from logic without ceasing to be logical. Instead, it denied the universality of the law of non-contradiction formulated as the impossibility of simultaneous affirmation and negation, on the grounds that it is empirically inferred from the study of the regularities of the real world that surrounds man. Therefore, hypothetically it is not obligatory at all that in different worlds it has the same necessary vigor. Because he believed that in the real world there was no contradiction, he developed the idea of the world of “the realized contradiction”, that is, of the world in which the laws of non-contradiction and of the excluded third are not valid. He tried to build a logical system in which these laws did not apply. He called it “imaginary” logic, or non-Aristotelian. By renouncing the law of non-contradiction, he attempted against the principle both of logic and of all classical science.
In imaginary logic, Vasíliev introduced, in addition to affirmative and negative judgments, indefinite or indifferent judgments. These make it possible to more adequately describe cognition through imaginary logic. Vasíliev defined a set of imaginary logics, very different for their properties, for the character of the negations used in them, etc. That is to say, the concept of imaginary logic had for him a collective character. Each type of imaginary logic assumes its own foundation of foundational principles whose formalization requires specific systems.
Influence of your studies
It was in the origins of little less than the parts of modern non-classical mathematical logic and its priority in promoting new logical conceptions is recognized on a world scale. N. Rescher, a contemporary American logician, considers him the founder of polysemantic logic. In his ideas linked to the critique in 1910 of the law of the excluded third, Vasíliev anticipated the birth of the intuitionist law, also an alternative to the classical one. He is rightly considered the founder of paraconsistent logic, free from the law of non-contradiction. In it, the leitmotif of imaginary logic is embodied at a formal level, not Aristotelian in the direct sense. Newton da Costa ( b.1929), professor at the University of Sao Paulo , and his disciple Ayda Arruda ( 1936 – 1983 ), Brazilian scientists specialized in paraconsistent logic.
Plays
Between 1912 and 1913 he published his outstanding works Logic and Metalogic and Imaginary Logic (non-Aristotelian). Vasíliev’s works are little known to Western readers, after 1925 he published nothing; his articles on the foundational ideas of imaginary logic from 1910 – 1912 appeared in little-known Russian magazines. In the 1980s V. Bazhánov, a Soviet philosopher (b. 1953 ), found Vasiliev’s archive in his small homeland, Kazan, with a large quantity of unpublished materials. Vasiliev’s first scientific biography and a compilation of his main works were published in 1989 inMoscow . The informal style and conceptual richness of Vasíliev’s work make it especially valuable
