Quotes About Logic

A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.

Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.

concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

If there's a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there's a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.

hándicaps racionales

Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

Word learning is as scandalous an induction problem as the acquisition of syntax or the practice of science, because there are an infinite number of generalizations, most of them wrong, that are logically consistent with any sample of experiences

Many of our fiercest controversies involve decisions on how to reconcile fuzzy family resemblance concepts with the classical categories demanded by logic and law.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

Most disputes about "correct" usage are questions of custom and authority rather than grammatical logic (see "The Language Mavens" in my book The Language Instinct), and in these disputes in particular, both parties have grammatical logic on their side. Their

there's nothing common about common sense.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.