The Logic of Law by Frank van Dun was recently published in Libertarian Papers. I tracked down his other paper referenced at the start as well: The Lawful and the Legal
I grabbed a couple free intro to logic books recently, but this is a difficult piece for me to understand fully. For now, I guess I am just curious what you all have to say.
Just started reading it today. He uses the term “artificial person” which threw me for a loop for awhile, but I got it now.
Yup, me as well. I had been hoping that someone with a more advanced knowledge of symbolic logic would walk us through the further analysis.
If you REALLY want to try and grasp what logic is using the praxeological method, I recommend this work:
Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action by Roderick Long
I’m actually reading it myself right now.
Roderick Long also has a series of lectures concerning philosophy which are also very good. They can be found here:
Roderick Long lectures
I recommend going by number so not to be confused. [ They are under the lecture links ] The lectures themselves are a good starting point in what I think you are trying to do. Dr. Long doesn’t make it too technical, though the article I gave above is technical. Listen to the lectures and I think you will be able to conquer the articles you are looking at.
I second this. That was a very good read.
That paper was the first time I had heard of Wittgenstein. I read/skimmed it a couple of times over before realizing that I had a lot to learn if I wanted to contribute substantively; however, I am choosing for now to not revisit it. =)
One work which I am doing my best to explore is Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, I’ve a good deal of respect for Roderick Long but I don’t think that I agree with his approach completely. What exactly are the “lecture links”? [*-)]
The symbolic logic he uses is not really needed to understand the article. As he mentions early on, it is only a way of double checking that the conclusions he draws [which are no great revelations, more on this later] aren’t flawed by errors that might creep in from hidden vagaries and vaguenesses of English.
What really needs to be examined closely if the article and its ideas interest you are the definitions and assumptions. For example, right off the bat he takes it as given that people can own each other. Now of course if he was axiomatizing Austrian Theory he might use as an axiom “People do not own each other.” But his goal is to point out the different axioms assumed by people over the years, and apparently there were those who held that people might own other people, at least to some extent.
In math, where symbolic logic finds its natural home, it isn’t used to discover stuff. Human creativity and genius discover the great theorems. Symbolic logic itself is studied to show what it can and cannot reveal, its strengths and limitations. It is a mathematical model of the rules of thought, but the actual thinking is done in “common sense”. Of course originally it was hoped that symbolic logic could be used to replace human thinking, but it was proven way too limited.
If there is a particular line you are stuck on, feel free to quote it and ask.
A thought occurred to me. Does he say people can own each other the same way a person can own an object? I think he does. If I remember right, he uses the same symbol to describe Person A owning person B as Person A owning a sheep .
If that is so, I think it is not the best way to axiomatize a legal system. Most legal systems don’t assume that it’s perfectly OK to slowly roast person B and eat him, even those that had master and serf relations.