Ivan Orlov

Ivan Efimovich Orlov (Russian: Иван Ефимович Орлов; Galich, Kostroma Oblast, – Moscow, after 1936 ) was a Russian philosopher, a forerunner of relevant and other substructural logics, and an industrial chemist. The date of his death is unknown, but is most likely between 1936 and 1937. Education and Scientific Career Orlov studied at the Natural Sciences Faculty of Moscow University. His academic career began in 1916, when he published several papers related to the method of inductive reasoning and the notion of inductive proof. For 7 years beginning 1916, he published no scientific work, presumably because of the political turmoil of the era. In the 1920s, he taught in the newly established Communist Academy, and was an officer at the Chemical Institute. In 1923 Orlov resumed his academic activity, becoming very productive. Most of his papers were published in leading Soviet ideological journals, where he waxed polemical in the manner typical of that place and time. Orlov's work bore on the philosophy of mathematics and logic, specifically on the so-called dialectical logic, Marxist in nature. He wrote on the theory of probability, psychology, theory of music, and on chemical engineering. Logic Analyzing the development of the natural sciences, he sought to uncover their specific "logic." According to Orlov, the laws of thought should be treated as formal rules, bounded by the laws of identity and contradiction. (When Orlov wrote this, the invention of natural deduction, the sequent calculus, and the semantic tableaux all lay in the future.) We must seek the semantic relation between antecedent and consequent. The main "contradiction of logic" manifests itself in the linkage of premise and corollary, and requires a logic different from the traditional one. If we insist that a corollary be a necessary condition of the premises then, according to Orlov, we necessarily arrive at a non-Aristotelian logic, dialectical in nature.