The Logical Alien

Are there forms of thought which are alien to us, but home to others? Is our form of thought just one among many? Or is it (in essentials) the form of thought per se? Are such questions even sensible? Descartes, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, among many, were exercised by such questions. Frege, and then Wittgenstein, discussed the possibility of a logical alien, a thinker whose thought is guided by a different logic yet still counts as a thinker. In 1991 Chicago philosopher James Conant published a paper which brought this issue into clear form and placed its illuminatingly into historical…