On Science and Logic

I am only pointing out that the material or external world in general is an inferred world and that therefore particular experiments far from taking us out of the magic circle of inference into some supposed direct contact with reality, are themselves evidential only as parts of that great inference. The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels ’science’ to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken. Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought. I mean, the proper distinction for our present purpose: that purpose being to find whether there is any class of thoughts which has objective value, which is not merely a fact about how the human cortex behaves. For that purpose we can make no distinction between science and other logical exercises of thought, for if logic is discredited science must go down along with it.

–

C. S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 62.