Quotes About Logic

Rhetoric uses syllogisms and other suasions to bring about a change of heart and of mind.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

For Polanyi the deepest flaw in market liberalism is that it subordinates human purposes to the logic of an impersonal market mechanism.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Criticism, I said, is an attempt to find the weak spots in a theory, and these, as a rule, can be found only in the more remote logical consequences which can be derived from it. It is here that purely logical reasoning plays an important part in science.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

The Vienna Circle was empiricist and phenomenalist, Popper was a critical rationalist.

Moreover, if we could show, on general logical grounds, that the scientific quest is likely to succeed, one could not understand why anything like success has been so rare in the long history of human endeavours to know more about our world.

Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.

intelligences. If we subscribe to the false idea that being emotional is the opposite of being rational, we'll set up

Reason is the measure of all things.

Logically, abortion opponents should not make arguments about the harm abortion supposedly does to women. Ending a pregnancy would be just as bad if it left women better off, as indeed it usually does—that is why opponents call it "selfish.

The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

Code writers and engineers often maintain the fiction that their own psychology has little bearing on their work. Reason rules.

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

It (proof by contradiction) is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.

One rather curious conclusion emerges, that pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. ... For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.