Abstract

1. One sometimes finds, in popular literature, the statement that formal logic is called formal because it studies the forms of thought: concepts, judgments, inferences. To confine the definition in this way would, to say the least, be an inaccuracy. Study of concepts and other forms of thought is generally assumed to be a task of philosophy; and it attains its highest development in dialectical philosophy. The fact is that statements such as the one we have cited are usually followed by the explanation that formal logic studies thoughts — concepts, judgments, inferences — in terms of their formal structure and construction, that is, of various general ways of connecting parts of their concrete content. And it is observed that the logical structure of thought emerges as the result of abstraction, the identification and separation of the general from a multiplicity of individual facts differing in content, and that it is then recorded in terms of formulas