Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

648 Petr Dvoˇrák
ter characteristic applies to both disciplines; they differ as to their goal, however.
While the goal of grammar is to speak correctly, the goal of logic is to discover
truth. 13 Hence, grammar also needs its “metagrammar”. 14 The goals Caramuel
assigns to metalogic are partly those dealt with today in the philosophy of logic
and partly in philosophical logic and metaphysics. This has to do with an alternative
understanding of metalogic in Caramuel as dealing with topics belonging to
both logic and metaphysics. Hence, metalogic is metaphysical logic, rather than
the philosophy of logic (meta-logic).
What is the nature of logic according to Caramuel? Logic is the ability (faculty)
to coordinate phonemes and characters in language and the corresponding ideas
in the mind. By this, a natural order of things is saved. 15 Hence, for Caramuel,
the order of language corresponds to the order of things. One cannot coordinate
words or infer statements from other statements at will. Caramuel is thus a naturalist
rather than a constructionist in his philosophical outlook on logic. Also,
logic is both the faculty (facultas) as well as a set of rules (methodus) given to
a specific purpose. Logic gives the rules of coordination on various levels (apprehension,
judgment and argumentation), directing linguistic and mental operations
with the goal of manifesting or inferring truths hitherto unknown. As is commonly
the case in scholastic logic, Caramuel does not differentiate semantics from formal
logic proper, for the rules concern both semantic content rules of compossible
combinations of expressions as well as the rules accounting for logical form. The
subject of logic is also dual: linguistic expressions both spoken and written as well
as the mental operations or acts behind them. Even though Caramuel devotes the
greatest amount of space in his logical writings to analysis on the language level
(comparing the relative sizes of his “Spoken” and “Mental Logics”), a psychologist,
mentalist streak in Caramuel’s conception of logic clearly cannot be brushed
aside. 16
13And the goal of rhetoric, also having to do with the production of language sound, is to
speak ornately.
14This is what Caramuel sets out to provide in his Grammatica Audax. To speak correctly
means, among other things, to avoid ambiguity. Caramuel, recognizing at least five senses of
“being” and consequently regarding the verb “to be” (esse) as vague and ambiguous, coins a
host of new expressions (sare, sere, syre, sore, sure. . . ) to capture the various subtle meanings
projected onto the term by the Scholastics, thus making the language of theology and philosophy
more precise, in the hope of resolving scholastic dilemmas in these disciplines. He does this systematically
in his later work Leptotatos latine subtilissimus (Vigevano 1681). For an explanatory
account of this endeavor cf. Sousedík [1991]. This seems to be a key part of Caramuel’s universal
grammar.
15Metalogica, Lib. I, disp. I, pp. 3-4.
16Metalogica, Lib. I., disp. VI., § 2, p. 30: Pono secundo nomine Logicae a nobis hanc
intelligi scientiam, quae si Mentalis sit, tres dirigat mentis operationes: si Vocalis, tres lingua
operationes illis correspondentes: et tandem si Scripta, tres correspondentes linguae et menti.
(,,Secondly, I claim that under the name of “logic” we will understand such a science, which —
if mental — directs three operations of the mind, if spoken, [directs] three language operations
corresponding to the mental ones, if written, [directs three operations] corresponding to [the
operations] of language and the mind”).