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Logic Quotes

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Logic Quotes

“Pops added,"you know, they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve." "And if you do, you never get the results you expected," (Katherine) replied.”

HumorFunnyPoliticalResultsDemocracyHumourLogicElectionVotingSatireParadoxWise SayingsPoliticiansElectionsSad But TrueGovernmentsFalse HopeGeneral ElectionsDisappointmentsGadflyElection ResultsI Hate PoliticsGeneral ElectionI Didn T VoteI Voted
Book:Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
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“The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.”

ThinkingPsychologyBehaviorEthicsLogicCharityDecision MakingParadoxAnimalsCognitionRationalismIllogicalRational Thought
Book:Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
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“The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior--benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control. 'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.' 'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed. 'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course--as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.”

LifeOrderLogicChaosLibrariesJungFilingLibrariansDewey Decimal
Book:Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, give it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.”

NatureLogicScientific Method
Book:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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“For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.”

LogicFallacyPangloss
Book:Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
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“When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language, built on the primary language truly used by the central nervous system. Thus the outward forms of our mathematics are not absolutely relevant from the point of view of evaluating what the mathematical or logical language truly used by the central nervous system is. However, the above remarks about reliability and logical and arithmetical depth prove that whatever the system is, it cannot fail to differ considerably from what we consciously and explicitly consider as mathematics.”

LogicMathematics
Book:The Computer and the Brain
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“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked”

MindBrainPsychologyLogicHuman BehaviorFallacy
Book:How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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“The principle we are examining may be called the principle of induction, and its two parts may be stated as follows: (a) When a thing of a certain sort A has been found to be associated with a thing of a certain other sort B, and has never been found dissociated from a thing of the sort B, the greater the number of cases in which A and B have been associated, the greater is the probability that they will be associated in a fresh case in which one of them is known to be present; (b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of cases of association will make the probability of a fresh association nearly a certainty, and will make it approach certainty without limit.”

LogicInduction
Author:Bertrand Russell
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“It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role”

LanguageLogic
Book:Introduction to Logical Theory
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“Origin of the Logical. Where has logic originated in men’s heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally have been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal - an illogical inclination, for there is no thing equal in itself - first created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived; the beings not seeing correctly had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination - to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right - had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. - The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.”

LogicMathematicsAxiomsLogical ThinkingPhilosophy Of Mathematics
Book:The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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“How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.”

MindPsychologyLogicHuman Behavior
Book:How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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“To select arbitrarily a set of first principles, and to make all our studies subordinate to them, is in effect to establish an intellectual dictatorship amd to kill the freedom of mind. It is true that it would give us orderliness, but it would be the orderliness of death.”

ThinkingPhilosophyOrderFreedomEducationLogicRationalismA PrioriFirst PrinciplesA Posteriori
Book:The Interpreter's House - The Chancellor's Installation Address Delivered Before the University of Edinburgh, July 20th 1938
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“It is a development of history that has transformed the political classes into social classes such that, just as the Christians are equal in heaven yet unequal on earth, so the individual members of a people are equal in the heaven of their political world yet unequal in the earthly existence of society.”

ChristianityDemocracyLogicIdealismCritiqueHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismMystification
Book:Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
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“Every time Nadia painted on the Artist here, Chad exploded. If all Nadia cared about was her sister, then I'm guessing Chad knew her sister, right?" "You're the person making up the story." The Body Artist put on a camisole and then pulled a heavy sweater over it. "Something about Nadia bothered him so much he shot her, and it could have been her cunt, since that's what most guys see when they look at a woman." "And so you display yours as a defiant statement: If that's all you think I am, that's what I'll be?”

FeminismLogicLiberationMorals
Book:Body Work
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“The logic is straightforward: A college degree supplies a credential & sometimes specific job skills that, combined with the college graduate's greater average level of intelligence should reduce the independent role of IQ in ways that would not apply as strongly to high school graduates.”

LogicCollege DegreeIntelligence QuotesJob Skills
Book:The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
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“Strong, uncontrolled emotions can become a cage. Fear can paralyze. Anger can consume. Jealousy can be blind. In those moments, freedom shrinks — because we no longer choose. The emotion chooses for us.”

ReligionLogicMental Health
Book:In the Quiet - On Logic, Spirit, and the Discipline of Living Without Certainty: Agnosticism, Deism, Stoicism and the Spiritual Discipline
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