Don't senses have objects? Our senses seem to involve reactions to objects or states of affairs in objective reality. Light, sounds, mechanical pressure, even orientation of one's limbs in space.
Are you saying that when you see an elephant, you really believe there is a real elephant?! Science told us this doesn't work that way. All we are aware of are our "percepts". So, when you believe there is an elephant because you believe you're looking at one, all you are aware of is a percept. Sure, the percept seems an awful lot like a real elephant except you have no idea what would be a real elephant. All you are aware of is a percept that may or may not be a percept of something, and in any case something you don't know what.
So objects, as we are aware of them, and at least as far as we understand what's really going on, are things in our mind. Still, I guess we can't stop ourselves from believing percept to be percepts of real things. In fact, we take them for the real thing. Me too.
OK, that was a derail. That's all probably true but it doesn't matter much. Still, take logical objects to be just as much objects as your elephant. It's just a different kind of objects, but we're familiar with that, as we have to accommodate not only visual objects but also smell objects, but also thing like pains and tiredness and what not, all very different from each other but all with the same characteristic that they are brought to us by our senses. Logic doesn't differ more than any two senses differ from each other. Think of pains and visual object.
So what is the object of a hypothetical logical sense?
The object of our sense of logic is obviously logic and more specifically logical relations, or at least a class of logical relation. So there. Isn't that good enough?
Treating logic (and mathematics by extension) as if they were senses is the line of thinking that leads to mathematical Platonism, to the assertion that the objects of a hypothetical logical/mathematical sense are abstract objects with some objective existence of their own. (Leaving us with the problem of how the logico-mathematical sense connects with them. Seemingly not causally.)
https://www.iep.utm.edu/mathplat/
We don't have a sense of mathematics. Only logic. We use our logical sense to invent mathematical ideas. We have logical intuitions without having to learn logic. We do not have mathematical intuitions unless we learn maths.
I lean very much towards mathematical Platonism myself, certainly in some of my moods. But an opposing line of argument, exemplified by Kant I guess, argues that logic arises from how the human mind works, that logical structure is imposed on reality by our mode of perception/conception. Which kind of turns the question of why physical science works, of why physical reality conforms to our impositions and why reality doesn't produce a lot more anomalous, illogical, counterintuitive and seemingly a-nomic events, into kind of a miracle. (Which motivates the "no-miracles argument" for scientific realism).
Platonism is a metaphysical idea. We can choose for ourselves whether to believe in it. Logic, we don't have a choice, really like we don't have to choice whether we see an elephant or not.
Either that, or the formal structure of our mode of cognition has evolved so as effectively to model the formal structure of how physical events occur out there in reality, which circles us back to something like mathematical Platonism.
Well, you can also choose to believe that.
I have to admit that I don't really have a clue what the foundations of logic are. But that sentence italicized above probably most closely approximates how I'm inclined to think about it. I think that reality possesses form and structure.
Sure, you can believe that. You already believe there are elephants. It's just one little step more.
(What all those mathematical heiroglyphs on physicists' chalkboards hope to capture.) And I think that human cognition is able to (perhaps partially and imperfectly) model that form. (It's not difficult to concoct an evolutionary explanation for why that might be.) Which points toward a possible account for how we can be aware of logic without it being a sense like sight or hearing (it derives from how we evolved to think), and for why physical reality so often cooperates when physicists make logico-mathematical predictions about how reality is going to behave in particular experimental conditions.
Well, that's all we need. Logic is a capacity not only of our brain, but of any neurobiological tissue. Ours just evolved the longest, and so perhaps it's best. Our sense of logic is just the part we are aware of, through our intuitions. Works a bit like memory when you get to remember something, but also like some other impressions, which are essentially secondary percepts, i.e. something like interpretations of our primary percepts in terms of more abstract objects, like threats, possibilities etc.
You're criticizing somebody there. Who, and why?
Scientists for being too slow and ideological.
It seems to me that trying to turn logical intuition into an additional sense runs the risk of turning it into something very close to extrasensory perception. Similar causal mechanism problems etc.
Nothing extrasensory. It works like nociception, memory, and much like any intuition we may have.
Me, I'm quite sure p and q implies p and there's nothing extrasensory about it. It's not so different from remembering something, except you don't have to learn it. All you have to learn are the words to express it, not very different from the words we use to speak, except meaning is learnt throughout our lives.
EB
