"Fairy Tale Logic" in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

In The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter and Susan, perplexed by Lucy’s emotional connection to her Narnia “game” and Edmund’s apparent shenanigans, take their problems to the Professor (Diggory), and ask his advice as to how to handle the situation. The Professor proceeds to lead them, somewhat Socratically, to the conclusion that Lucy may actually be telling the truth about the magical land behind the doors of the wardrobe. The reasoning is simple but sound: has Lucy been known to lie? (No.) Has Edmund been known to lie? (Yes.) Then which ought one to believe? The conclusion is obvious, in spite of the fantastical nature of Lucy’s claims.

In a way, this little bit of Lewis’s Chronicles is an example of Chesterton’s “fairy tale logic.” Chesterton observes, in a somewhat Humean way, that the laws of science are not certain, that scientific “truth” does not proceed from a non-contingent mathematical certainty as some would claim or otherwise like to believe. There is no law of logic, in other words, which demands that leaves be green and not pink and the sky blue and not green. By his own example, logic may conclude that a unicorn can not at the same time have three legs and four, but cannot rule out the existence of unicorns. Peter and Susan seem to side with Edmund on loosely scientific grounds: it certainly runs contrary to any past empirical experience to find a forest in the wardrobe. But what the Professor pronounces is a line of reasoning which surpasses the assumptions of modern science: it is a logic that stems from relationship.

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