Edward Abbey Quotes

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.

However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.

Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.

To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

Science is not wisdom.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.