whether he must spell out the opponent’s objection in full or in outline whenever a detailed response is possible; or whether he may omit mentioning it altogether, neither summarily nor in detail; or whether it suffices for him to mention it only in summary, without elaboration.

All of this is no more than conventional terminology, comparable to the words people agree upon to express what is in their minds, or to the customs people adopt in certain actions because they deem them preferable—even though something else might in fact be better. These are not fixed realities in themselves, grounded in universally intelligible principles that all nations acknowledge, as the logicians claim for their discipline.

Indeed, those who say that the terms “cause” and “proof” may refer to either of the two meanings discussed are closer to reason than those who insist that a proof can consist only of two premises. The latter arbitrarily privilege one number over others without any rationale, whereas the former attend to real qualities of cause and proof—namely, whether they are complete or merely tending toward completion. What the former have considered is thus more consonant with truth and sound reason than the position of the latter, who rely on nothing but sheer assertion.

Logic, then, is a set of conventions devised by a man from Greece. For this reason discerning thinkers describe their logic as a purely conventional system coined by a Greek, one that rational people do not need and upon which the pursuit of knowledge in no way depends—just as it does not depend on speaking in their tongue with terms like philosophia, sophistica, analytica, ethologia, categorias, Isagoge, nor on their calling the verb “the word” and the particle “the instrument,” and other such expressions in their language by which they convey their meanings.