1009. On "Logical" in a Broad Sense

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                                                                                                On "Logical" in a Broad Sense

Hartshorne speaks of metaphysical questions as being "pseudofactual, or in a broad sense logical," and says that "Not, 'Does [God] exist with some world or other [?],' but only, 'With what world?' is the empirical or observational question. The rest is logic, in a broad sense, not fact" (NTOT, 89,102).

Question: What is "logic in a broad sense," or "in a broad sense logical"?

Answer: Transcendental conditions of the possibility of fact, or of the factual.—The point is that there are certain necessary implications of any fact, or of anything factual, that can be denied only at the price of self-contradiction, or incoherence, in the sense that the fact of the denial implicitly asserts these implications even while what is denied by the denial explicitly denies them. "Logic in a broad sense," then, is a way of saying that every fact necessarily presupposes a nonfactual but existential context, which must be implicitly asserted by any factual assertion whatever, even one that explicitly denies this same context. For as itself a fact, the denial implies as the necessary condition of its possibility the same existential context necessarily implied by any and all facts whatever, even merely conceivable facts. In this sense, "self-understanding is the issue." "It is a conceptual question, a question of self-understanding, clarity, and consistency" (88, 85).