Logic of Sense: 2021 Version

Abstract

Logic of sense is presented as a theoretical approach which avoids the “hard problem of consciousness” pitfall. The logic of sense theory objective is to follow the consciousness development “from inside”, as an answer to the question “how can we explain the consciousness and its content on the basis of itself with no dogmatic presupposition”. Nothing is accepted, however evident or complying with common sense it may seem, if not justified from that point of view. The basic categories of the logic of sense are introduced: smysl (sense), smyslopolaganiye (sense positing), tselostnost’ (integrity, wholeness), svyaznost’ (coherence, linkage) and others, and its main theses are argued for. The pure principle of consciousness could not have been disclosed without a close scrutiny of the millennia-old non-Western big cultures which unfold, in the course of their history, the non-Western versions of consciousness, thus testifying to plurality, and not universality, of reason. The philosophy of mind, as well as philosophy on the whole, remained so far limited by the initial set of dogmatically accepted presuppositions which they could not get rid of, erroneously taking them as having no alternative. Hence the importance of an attentive study of big cultures as a precious experience of unfolding the reason alternative to the version which lies at the basis of the philosopher’s native big culture. The main lines of a logic-and-meaning study of the big Arab-Islamic culture are discussed and its results are analyzed. The principal one is the discovery of process logic (P-logic, not to be confused with what is meant by this expression in contemporary Western philosophy) as an alternative to substance logic (S-logic) which lies at the basis of the big European culture. Any of the variety of the logics of sense is first and foremost the logic of predication, i.e., the way of defining the epistemic chain unfolding itself as the technology of the subject-predicate glue-together, which explains the coherence of human consciousness at the traditionally defined levels of sense perception, speech ability and reason. The results of implementing the logic-and-meaning approach in psychology are described. The objectives of further development of the logic-and-meaning project are sketched.