I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and trad...itional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory's empirical import) had been... misconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality, I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The foremost logical prerequisite of a rigid classification is that a mental item belong to no more than one category. Such either.../or logic presupposes a digital mode of thinking, which, unlike its analog counterpart, does not tolerate any "gray" shadings among mental fields. "Digital thinking" has a staccato character somewhat evocative of the on/off nature of the conventional light switch or the convulsive progression of time on digital clocks, in marked contradistinction to the smooth, legato style of the dimmer or the traditional analog clock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with i...t. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That'...s logic."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penet...rated ... logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All logical truth and all truths that logic can warrant must turn upon meaning in the sense of intension. Because logic and the lo...gically certifiable comprise only such facts as are independent of all particular experience and are capable of being known with certainty merely through clear and cogent thinking. The same must hold of any analytic truth: if it is capable of being known by taking thought about it, then it must be independent of meaning in the sense of extension and turn upon meanings only in the sense of intension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »