Logic: Conditions and Consequences: 1 The Preconditions of Logic: Semiotic Roots

Logic does not originate in abstract thought alone. It arises wherever semiotic construal of relations becomes sufficiently explicit and recursive. Within systemic functional linguistics (SFL), cognition is inseparable from semiosis: to think is to construe, to construe is to semiotically navigate potential. Logic, then, is the formal articulation of semiotic relations that support coherent construal across contexts.

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1. Semiotic Patterning as Cognitive Groundwork

Before formal logic, humans already recognised relations of difference, consequence, and possibility:

• Temporal sequences: “If X happens, Y follows.”

• Causal inference: “Action A produces result B.”

• Contradiction and exclusion: “This cannot both be true.”

In SFL terms, these are construals of experience, realised in linguistic semiotic patterns. They constitute the preconditions for logical relations, providing a scaffold for formalisation.

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2. Language as Relational Infrastructure

Language does not merely report cognition; it enables it. Through functional grammar, clauses, and connectives, human construals of potential relations are made explicit, stabilised, and shareable.

• Conditional constructions realise hypothetical and inferential meaning.

• Negation marks exclusion, impossibility, and contradiction.

• Conjunctions, disjunctions, and other logical markers allow complex relational structuring.

Thus, logic emerges where semiotic potential is recursively constrained and expressed, forming the backbone of inferential reasoning.

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3. Recursive Semiotic Capacity

A defining precondition of logic is the capacity for recursion within construal: to relate not only events or objects, but the relations between relations themselves. In SFL, this is a form of metaconstrual: second-order meaning about first-order meaning.

• “If it rains, the ground gets wet. If the ground gets wet, the festival is postponed.”

• These chains of construals formalise inference patterns, making relational potential explicit across sequences.

Recursive semiotic capacity is thus the semiotic infrastructure of logic, turning individual construals into a structured field of possible inference.

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4. Summary: Preconditions as Semiotic Enabling

Logic, from this perspective, is possible because semiotic systems enable relational construal to be stabilised, articulated, and recursively extended. The preconditions are:

1. Pattern recognition and difference-making in experience.

2. Linguistic and semiotic scaffolds that stabilise relations.

3. Recursive meta-construal, allowing relations of relations to be explicit.

Logic emerges not as an innate faculty or abstract code, but as a semiotic extension of human relational construal: a method for organising potential meaning in ways that are consistent, shareable, and generative.