Natural Logic and the Course of Time: From Theology to Developmental Psychology

Abstract

The modern human sciences assume a fixed relationship between logic and the place of human beings in the natural order which have sprung from an emerging notion of correspondence between the externality of logic as system and the human being’s subjective logical abilities. Although this notion has evolved over many centuries, its onset was historically specific and can be located in medieval Christian thought which made “Man” the primary illustration for demonstrating the syllogism. First, this evolved so as to contribute to the birth of the study of “Man” in the modern human sciences. Secondly, it was accompanied by a re-definition of the human interior in terms of linear time, with the possibility of salvation as its end or goal; this was structured by “stages” involving the completion or perfection of an interiority that replaced earlier, static definitions of the human essence. Precursor notions for psychological “development” accompanied the interpenetration between logic and theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fundamental intra-human divide between “elect” (saved) and “reprobate” (damned) in the theory of predestination began to overlap with that between the scholastics’ “rational animal” and the non-logical other. The placing of a subjective logic within this fundamental division remains subliminally in foundational human science texts such as Locke’s Essay and Rousseau’s Emile. Thus it was from distant roots in natural logic that it, and modern psychology in particular, called in question the full humanity of two groups: children in general, and adults deemed “developmentally disabled.”