Is logic empirical?

Hilary Putnam

pp. 75-100

in: Robert S. Cohen, Mark W. Wartofsky (eds), A portrait of twenty-five years, Berlin, Springer, 1985

Abstract

I want to begin by considering a case in which "necessary' truths (or rather "truths', turned out to be falsehoods: the case of Euclidean geometry. I then want to raise the question: could some of the "necessary truths' of logic ever turn out to be false for empirical reasons? I shall argue that the answer to this question is in the affirmative, and that logic is, in a certain sense, a natural science.