Quotes About Logic

Did I think that by making you rational about one thing, I could make you rational about everything? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to save you from your fears.

Emotions, far from opposing reason, are extraordinarily effective means for implementing goals. Passions possess a functional, subconscious logic.

Como en el resto de las tendencias destructivas, el hecho de que el empleo del maltrato tenga una lógicas adaptativa subyacente no significa que debamos aceptarlo, desearlo o descuidar su erradicación. Por el contrario, una mayor comprensión de la lógica que subyace a tales tácticas y de los contextos en que se producen puede llevar a métodos más eficaces para reducirlas o eliminarlas.

Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worst still, they appear to have a bigger bias blind spot, meaning they are less able to recognize the holes in their logic.

What both paradoxes show is that decisions based on probabilistic arguments are not logical decisions. Logic and probabilistic arguments are incompatible... Jerry Cornfield justified the findings that smoking causes lung cancer by appealing to a piling up of evidence, where study after study shows results that are highly improbable unless you assume that smoking is the cause of the cancer. Is it illogical to believe that smoking causes cancer?

This lack of fit between logic and statistically based decision is not something that can be accounted for by finding a faulty assumption in Cohen's paradoxes. It lies at the heart of what is meant by logic.

It must come from your father's side of the family, Allison informed her with severe disapproval. You never got that sort of dreary, plebeian logic from my genes, dear! Beowulfans' cognitive processes rely far more on the creative and intuitive manipulation of concepts without the drudgery of applying reason to them. Don't you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it that way? That's why I never indulge in such a vice.

There's not much point in making logical arguments to someone who's already decided to ignore inconvenient truths, so

if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins.

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.

So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I

Be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

Fantasy is reason's sweetheart.

He didn't get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space.

I have an analytical mind.

Ale rozum jest zawsze czym? mizernym wobec uczucia; jest ograniczony jak wszystko, co pozytywne; uczucie jest bez kresu. Rozumowa? tam, gdzie trzeba uczu?, to w?a?ciwo?? ma?ych dusz. Vandenesse

With the faculty for severe logic sedulously cultivated by elderly women during long evenings of gossip till they can always find an hypothesis to fit all circumstances,

Some persons may, perhaps, think that this declaration is somewhat autocratic and self-assertive. They will quarrel with the novelist for wanting to be an historian, and will call him to account for writing politics. I am simply fulfilling an obligation — that is my reply. The work I have undertaken will be as long as a history; I was compelled to explain the logic of it, hitherto unrevealed, and its principles and moral purpose.

This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.

There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense.

Hay cosas absurdas que tienen toda la apariencia de un legítimo razonamiento:

You are trying to be logical. But most of the logic we live with is a lie, and most of our attempts to be logical are only attempts to evade the reality. So if we have a puzzle, stop trying to solve it. Don't cling to thoughts and notions. Let them pass through your mind and then dismiss them—or treat them all with equal indifference. Nothing

I think the best general discussion of scientific rationality is W. H. Newton-Smith's The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)