Baldwin's Functional Logic.
A. W. Moore · Psychological Bulletin · 1907
This is the most comprehensive attempt in Logic yet made in America.Aside from the question of its success -which of course cannot be passed upon until the remaining and larger portions of the work appear -the fact that such a program is offered, and the general standpoint and method of the treatment are further evidence that philosophy in America is rapidly passing from the absorbing, translating, albeit necessary, period of German apprenticeship into a free and initiative adulthood.As has been so repeatedly pointed out by various writers representing the so-called ' pragmatic ' movement, the most obvious and immediate field for reconstructive applications of the ' instrumental' view of thought is the field in which the movement started -logic.The view that regards thought as supporting and supported by the other phases of experience, rather than as a wholly independent strand, patently calls for an account of the way in which the other ' modes' of experience condition and are conditioned by thought and of the -way in which the various stages of thought determine each other, -in short, for a ' genetic logic' This, in general, is the task Professor Baldwin has undertaken.However, Professor Baldwin wishes it understood at the startthough one would not have to read far to discover the fact for himself -that he is not a 'pragmatist' in any ' alarming' sense of the term.Indeed, 'pragmatism' is freely criticised throughout the volume.Whether in these rejections of pragmatism Professor Baldwin succeeds in avoiding a static absolutism, which he also explicitly disavows, will be clearer in the end.The scope of the work is not confined to the stages and processes of reflection as such, but aims to follow the entire history of the cognitive function through what are called the ' pre-logical,' ' quasi-logical,' ' logical-proper' and ' hyper-logical' stages.The present volume 81