The prestigious Science magazine recently published a paper developed by researchers in Barcelona and Budapest on logical reasoning in preverbal infants (see the article here), that is, before they learn how to speak, in which they concluded, remarkably, that babies have the same capacity to draw logical conclusions as adult humans. In particular, the researchers sought to prove that babies can produce syllogisms, just like adults, and without the need for verbal language.
Of course, just like any other experimental finding, this is to be confirmed by independent sources, and the way its conclusions were obtained is, as always, debatable. Nevertheless, supposing those findings were true, this may be one of the most remarkable discoveries for epistemology, confirming the intuitions layed by countless philosophers before, and disproving those by others who diagreed. Suddenly, logical reasoning would be independent of the language tht coveys it, and perhaps even innate and universal amongst humans, contrary to hypothesis that state that reason is a structure related to language and an affair we learn from other via trial and error and other inductive means (such as David Hume’s tabula rasa).
The study provides no insight on whether logic is universal beyond humans, which is beyond their scope, but it does suggest it is univeral within our species, and that all people, regardless of age, origin, or gender, are equally capable of reasoning logically. This is an important factor to take into account for many fields, such as social behaviour, psychology, or education. In this last one, I could say I was wrong in my last article, in which I argued that fallacies are widespread precisely because how reasoning is learned from our surroundings, and how it is related to language (as many fallacies rely on language subtly hiding the flawed logic underneath). If those results were verified, our approach to teaching argumens would have to shift from how to reason, into putting that reasoning to work.
In addition, since language would no longer be an underlying piece behind reason, but rather just a mean by which it can be exchanged, bare logic results can be directly extrapolated between each other. For example, mathematical theorems, expressed in an artificial and technical language, could be taken straight into any philosophical discussion, without being in risk of missing the point or breaking mid-way because of the different linguistic systems.
Speaking of linguistics, our understanding of language could be affected as well. If reasoning predates verbal communication, perhaps the later is a consequence of the first, and our languages don’t simply arise as more refined forms of grunting to communicate, but are deliberately constructed to convey complex ideas, just like in mathematics the primitive language of logic and set theory is expanded as one goes deeper, adding newer symbols and relations that are collections of simpler primitive ones. Not only that, but Orwell’s 1984 dystopian idea of creating a new language that prevents speaking about certain ideas may be a thing of the past.
Quite ironically, we could be about to confirm inductively (experimentally) that deduction is universal.
