The fact that logic is content-dependent opens a new horizon concerning the relationship of logic to ontology (or objectology). Although the classical concepts of a priori and a posteriori propositions (or judgments) has lately become rather blurred, there is an undeniable fact: it is certain that the far origin of mathematics is based on empirical practical knowledge, but nobody can claim that higher mathematics is empirical.
Thanks to category theory, it is an established fact that some sort of very important logical systems: the classical and the intuitionistic (with all its axiomatically enriched subsystems), can be interpreted through topoi. And these possibility permits to consider topoi, be it in a Noneist or in a Platonist way, as universes, that is, as ontologies or as objectologies. Now, the association of a topos with its correspondent ontology (or objectology) is quite different from the association of theoretical terms with empirical concepts. Within the frame of a physical theory, if a new fact is discovered in the laboratory, it must be explained through logical deduction (with the due initial conditions and some other details). If a logical conclusion is inferred from the fundamental hypotheses, it must be corroborated through empirical observation. And if the corroboration fails, the theory must be readjusted or even rejected.
In the case of categorial logic, the situation has some similarity with the former case; but we must be careful not to be influenced by apparent coincidences. If we add, as an axiom, the tertium non datur to the formalized intuitionistic logic we obtain classical logic. That is, we can formally pass from the one to the other, just by adding or suppressing the tertium. This fact could induce us to think that, just as in physics, if a logical theory, let’s say, intuitionistic logic, cannot include a true proposition, then its axioms must be readjusted, to make it possible to include it among its theorems. But there is a radical difference: in the semantics of intuitionistic logic, and of any logic, the point of departure is not a set of hypothetical propositions that must be corroborated through experiment; it is a set of propositions that are true under some interpretation. This set can be axiomatic or it can consist in rules of inference, but the theorems of the system are not submitted to verification. The derived propositions are just true, and nothing more. The logician surely tries to find new true propositions but, when they are found (through some effective method, that can be intuitive, as it is in Gödel’s theorem) there are only three possible cases: they can be formally derivable, they can be formally underivable, they can be formally neither derivable nor underivable, that is, undecidable. But undecidability does not induce the logician to readjust or to reject the theory. Nobody tries to add axioms or to diminish them. In physics, when we are handling a theory T, and a new describable phenomenon is found that cannot be deduced from the axioms (plus initial or some other conditions), T must be readjusted or even rejected. A classical logician will never think of changing the axioms or rules of inference of classical logic because it is undecidable. And an intuitionist logician would not care at all to add the tertium to the axioms of Heyting’s system because it cannot be derived within it.
The foregoing considerations sufficiently show that in logic and mathematics there is something that, with full right, can be called “a priori“. And although, as we have said, we must acknowledge that the concepts of a priori and a posteriori are not clear-cut, in some cases, we can rightly speak of synthetical a priori knowledge. For instance, the Gödel’s proposition that affirms its own underivabilty is synthetical and a priori. But there are other propositions, for instance, mathematical induction, that can also be considered as synthetical and a priori. And a great deal of mathematical definitions, that are not abbreviations, are synthetical. For instance, the definition of a monoid action is synthetical (and, of course, a priori) because the concept of a monoid does not have among its characterizing traits the concept of an action, and vice versa.
Categorial logic is, the deepest knowledge of logic that has ever been achieved. But its scope does not encompass the whole field of logic. There are other kinds of logic that are also important and, if we intend to know, as much as possible, what logic is and how it is related to mathematics and ontology (or objectology), we must pay attention to them. From a mathematical and a philosophical point of view, the most important logical non-paracomplete systems are the paraconsistent ones. These systems are something like a dual to paracomplete logics. They are employed in inconsistent theories without producing triviality (in this sense also relevant logics are paraconsistent). In intuitionist logic there are interpretations that, with respect to some topoi, include two false contradictory propositions; whereas in paraconsistent systems we can find interpretations in which there are two contradictory true propositions.
There is, though, a difference between paracompleteness and paraconsistency. Insofar as mathematics is concerned, paracomplete systems had to be coined to cope with very deep problems. The paraconsistent ones, on the other hand, although they have been applied with success to mathematical theories, were conceived for purely philosophical and, in some cases, even for political and ideological motivations. The common point of them all was the need to construe a logical system able to cope with contradictions. That means: to have at one’s disposal a deductive method which offered the possibility of deducing consistent conclusions from inconsistent premisses. Of course, the inconsistency of the premisses had to comply with some (although very wide) conditions to avoid triviality. But these conditions made it possible to cope with paradoxes or antinomies with precision and mathematical sense.
But, philosophically, paraconsistent logic has another very important property: it is used in a spontaneous way to formalize the naive set theory, that is, the kind of theory that pre-Zermelian mathematicians had always employed. And it is, no doubt, important to try to develop mathematics within the frame of naive, spontaneous, mathematical thought, without falling into the artificiality of modern set theory. The formalization of the naive way of mathematical thinking, although every formalization is unavoidably artificial, has opened the possibility of coping with dialectical thought.
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