A RIDICULOUS AND ODIOUS HARANGUE

LAURENT LAFFORGUE - Fields Medal 2002
Permanent Professor IHES
Bures-sur-Yvette - FRANCE

I recently noticed that some lines from a paper by Jean-Yves Beziau “The relativity and universality of logic” have become the object of a ridiculous and odious harangue that takes up more than half of his Wikipedia page.

The paper, which I have read in its entirety, is at once both extremely interesting in its own right, and also for setting in perspective the author’s whole corpus of work over many years and defining a precise discipline which Jean-Yves Béziau has dedicated his efforts to establishing, which he calls “universal logic”.

Based on a distinction between logic as reasoning and logic as a theory of reasoning, the paper defines “universal logic” as the general science of reasoning, a little like the way general linguistics is the science of what all human languages have in common.

The paper spells out both the sense and the reference of “universal logic” by delineating its domain of study and at the same time justifying the choice of constituent words in its name, by evoking their semantic fields and those of neighbouring expressions.
In a third part, Jean-Yves Béziau makes a critical comparison with three other more or less scientific expressions which are currently in use and to which he prefers “universal logic”: “logical pluralism”, “non-classical logics”, and “cognitive science”.

Following the logic of his paper, he draws these comparisons both from the point of view of their content and objects of study, and from the point of view of the meanings and associations of their constituent words. It is by examining the semantic field of the word “pluralism” that he arrives at his observations about the contemporary field of “political correctness”, which he criticizes for sound reasons, as it represents a danger for the freedom of expression and of thought.

I invite therefore the people who launched or contributed to the polemic against Jean-yves Béziau, in particular those who despoiled his Wikipedia page with 30-plus lines of rant against 5 or 6 lines from one paper, to comment in the same proportion on the whole of this remarkable paper, and on the works and initiatives (such as the journal Logica Universalis which he founded, or the multiple congresses he has organized on this subject, etc.) whose meaning this article explicates.