Is logic empirical?: Encyclopedia II – Is logic empirical?
In his paper Is logic empirical? Hilary Putnam, whose PhD studies were supervised by Reichenbach, pursued Quine’s idea systematically. In the first place, he made an analogy between laws of logic and laws of geometry: as Euclid’s postulates were once believed to be truths about the physical space in which we live, now rather we believe we live in a non-Euclidean world, with a different and fundamentally incompatible notion of straight line. In particular, he claimed that what physicists have learned about quantum mechanics provides a compelling case for abandoning certain familiar principles of classical logic for this reason: realism about the physical world, which Putnam generally maintains, demands that we square up to the anomalies associated with quantum phenomena. Putnam understands realism about physical objects as involving that the properties of momentum and position exist for quanta. Since the uncertainty principle says that either the one is determined or the other, but both
