The logical order of primacy in an argument isn’t necessarily the same as the historical order of primacy. For example, Morris Cohen argued in An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934) that the axioms of a system are often discovered after the theorems. According to Cohen, many of Euclid’s theorems were already known to the Ancient Greeks for hundreds of years before Euclid did his groundbreaking work. Euclid’s contribution wasn’t as much to discover the theorems as to discover the axioms for theorems already known. His contribution was largely to systematize already-existing knowledge.

In other words: What was in the history of ideas come up with and made known before and after doesn’t necessarily match up with what’s logically precedent and antecedent.

I’ve always been interested in the questions of why people do what they do and why people feel and think as they do. Being of a philosophical and scientific orientation, my interest in those questions has led me to study the most philosophically deep schools of thought in economics, linguistics, and some of the other sciences of human action and the human mind.

To my surprise, though, many or even most people, at least in the modern West, find it uncomfortable to generalize about people. The problem with that is: Science, whether it’s about people or things, is about generalization. Thus, to find it uncomfortable to generalize about people is to find it uncomfortable to do science about people. In other words: To my surprise, the controversies in the sciences of human action and the human mind aren’t only about what the best models are but are also about whether models are even possible.

See below for some of what I’ve written on the psychology and sociology of that debate:

1. Is the mental subject to scientific law?
2. The Enlightenment and Romanticism

In Christian cosmogony, it was God who (1) made something out of nothing and then (2) gave that something the order that it has. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume argued for “a new hypothesis of cosmogony,” which was a challenge to the latter doctrine: that without God, the order in the world of matter has no good explanation. In essence, he argued that the order in the world of matter can be accounted for without hypothesizing supernatural intervention, for that order is the natural result of something that everybody knows: that some configurations of matter are more stable than others. If some matter in an unstable form by chance falls into another unstable form, then by definition (i.e., by definition of the term “unstable”) it’s unlikely for the matter to stay in that form for a long time. It’s when matter instead by chance falls into a stable form that it’s likely to stay like that. Chaos falls into chaos until it settles into order.

Interestingly: In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins used that Humean argument in order to contextualize biological evolution. Hume explained how chaos naturally settles into order (which is an explanation of any kind of evolution, whether biological or not), and to that explanation Dawkins added the idea of a replicator (which is how biological evolution works in that context).

Why are there so many rocks? Because rocks are especially stable. If some matter by chance falls into the form of a rock, then it’s likely to stay like that. And why are there so many birds? Not because birds are especially stable on the level of the individual, like rocks, but because birds are especially stable on the level of the group. They’re especially good at replicating themselves, and thus keeping the group in existence, before themselves falling out of existence.

That Humean argument, however, falls to thoroughgoing subjectivism. The difference between chaos and order isn’t inherent to the world of matter. The difference instead comes out of something subjective: categorization.

Rocks are stable because rocks are rocks whether they’re big or small, rough or smooth, etc. But why categorize like that? A big “rock” can fall and break into small “rocks,” and a rough “rock” can be made into a smooth “rock” after enough time in a river. Our categorization scheme is such that through those transformations they’re all still “rocks.” How stable! Theoretically speaking, though, it’s possible to use any categorization scheme that you want. Anything can be thought of as staying the same through any transformation, and anything can be thought of as not staying the same through any transformation. It’s possible to imagine a categorization scheme that puts even rocks into chaotic flux.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I put a lot of effort into studying David Hume’s work and building a phenomenalist foundation for linguistics with the help of his work. I shelved the project after a while (not because it wasn’t going well but because I got sidetracked). And then in the early 2020s, I happened to go back to Friedrich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order (1952), which I had read long before that but without getting much out of it. Suddenly, though, it all made sense. And with Hayek’s orienting influence, I got to work putting into writing my late-2000s, early 2010s work on Humean linguistics, now Humean-Hayekian.

There’s something else that I should also mention that influenced me between my original late-2000s, early-2010s work on Humean linguistics and my recent work on Humean-Hayekian linguistics: Around when I went back to The Sensory Order, I spent a lot of time and energy on logic. Besides doing my own thinking, I studied with great interest John Stuart Mill’s 1,000+ page textbook A System of Logic (1843) and Morris Cohen’s more concise and eloquently written textbook An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934). Thus, between (1) my late-2000s, early-2010s work on adapting Humean phenomenalism to linguistics, (2) my newfound appreciation, as of the early 2020s, for Hayek’s effort to reconcile phenomenalism, which is a traditional doctrine in philosophy, with 20th-century science, and (3) my newfound understanding of logic, I found myself better oriented than ever in all of the ways that mattered for building the phenomenalist foundation for linguistics that I envisioned first in the late 2000s. That project had turned into Humean-Hayekian logico-linguistic system building.

See below for what I’ve written so far on that system:

1. Sensation as such vs. sensation of
2. From linguistics to logic
3. The mental vs. the physical
4. The subjective vs. the objective
5. The self vs. the other
6. Words as sets
7. Form and substance
8. Semantics and syntax
9. Word-thought overwriting
10. An analogy to word-thought overwriting
11. The phenomenalism of categorization
12. The a priori and the a posteriori
13. The branches of linguistics
14. The reification of words and money

When two people are talking to each other, each utterance is such that there’s a speaker and a listener. Furthermore, there’s everybody who’s neither the speaker nor the listener.

When a first-person pronoun is used (e.g., “I,” “me”), the speaker is referring to themselves. But it’s also possible for the speaker to refer to something close to themselves (e.g., “this,” “these”) or somewhere close to themselves (e.g., “here”).

In deixis, there’s:

1. The speaker
2. The listener
3. Neither the speaker nor the listener
4. The location in space of the speaker, the listener, or neither the speaker nor the listener
5. The location in time of the utterance

Thus, it’s possible to refer to:

1. The speaker of the utterance
2. The listener
3. Neither the speaker nor the listener
4. Something near the speaker of the utterance
5. Something near the listener
6. Something near neither the speaker nor the listener
7. Somewhere near the speaker of the utterance
8. Somewhere near the listener
9. Somewhere near neither the speaker nor the listener
10. The past with respect to the utterance
11. The present with respect to the utterance
12. The future with respect to the utterance

There’s also:

1. Male vs. female
2. Singular vs. plural

My interest in using notation in logic (e.g., ~ for “not,” strictly defined) is in part a result of often finding it useful to keep track of how I would notate the logical skeleton of what’s fleshed out as natural prose. For example, in natural prose the word “not” doesn’t always mean ~. In natural prose, there’s no 1-to-1 correspondence between the linguistic form and the logical substance. With the symbol ~ strictly defined, you can, whenever doing so would be useful, ask yourself: “Is the present usage of the word ‘not’ equivalent to ~?”

When I’m reading or writing, my internal experience is often such that I visualize ~ and other symbols as furigana. That is, I often ask myself whether I could justifiably put a certain logical symbol above a given word or phrase.

When writing, that technique helps you get the best of both worlds of the artificial and the natural: the artificiality of scientific writing and the naturalness of artistic writing. It helps you keep track of the logic without there being any need for you to artificially limit or regiment how you use natural language.