Logic Is No Constraint

To think of logic as constraining something is to imagine, or try to imagine, how things would be without the constraint. Since neither talk of an illogical world nor talk of illogical thought can be made sense of, the whole question cannot be meaningfully asked and so may be dismissed in good conscience: "in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable.... We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either" (Wittgenstein)....

It is a sign of confusion to say either that the logicality of the world has its source in the structure of thought or that the logicality of thought has its source in the structure of the world—as though the logicality of thought and the logicality of the world were two different facts that need to be hooked together, rather than being two sides of the same fact. We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing. The relation between language and the world is not one of constraint, in either direction. As Wittgenstein says, “The laws of inference do not compel him to say or write such and such like rails compelling a locomotive." Reality doesn’t foist the rules of grammar on us; nothing does. Our thinking is free, rail-less. Yet it is misleading to say that we can change the rules of logical grammar as we please, because certain rules are essential for thinking at all. That doesn’t mean we run up against some sort of boundary; there are rules one cannot think past, but that means not “try as he may he can’t think it” but rather that once we leave those rules behind we no longer count as thinking. (And of course nothing forces us to think. We are free to lie around in a drug-induced stupor until we die of starvation.) Naturally we can make whatever stipulations we please as to what form of words will count as asking a question, making an assertion, and so forth; in that sense, the laws of grammar are radically malleable. But unless we act in accordance with rules that do make certain forms of words count as asking questions and making assertions, we cannot ask any questions or make any assertions; in that sense the laws of grammar are not malleable at all. To borrow a phrase from Hayek, the mind does not so much make rules as consist of rules; and a mind that "consists of rules" cannot intelligibly be interpreted either as making rules (as though it might have left them unmade), or as having rules imposed on it (as though it might have been free of them). Wittgenstein’s idea here is really a very Kantian one: we act freely when we act in accordance with a law we impose on ourselves, even though the structure of reason itself determines what law we can impose on ourselves.

--Roderick T. Long, "Anti-Psychologism in Economics: Wittgenstein and Mises"  
The Review of Austrian Economics, 2004 (Citations omitted.)