Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher
Source: Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937, p. 8
Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 45.
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher
Source: Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937, p. 8
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist
2003-10-20
Mommie Dearest
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html, quoted in Michael Shermer, "The Skeptic's Skeptic," Scientific American, November 2010, p. 86.
February/March
http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_24_2.html
Less than Miraculous
Free Inquiry
0272-0701
24
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." appears by itself in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).
Translation of the Latin phrase "Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.".
2000s, 2003
Variant: "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." in * 2004
“After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur.”
John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 2, “Axioms, Levels, and Iteration” (p. 19)
Douglas Hofstadter book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
This statement refers to a koan
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
“Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument.”
James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith
Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.
"Here is a theory of the world which you bring for my acceptance: well, there is the world; try — will the key fit? can you read the language into sense by it?" was the only method; and so I was led always to look at broad results, at pages and chapters, rather than at single words and sentences, where for a few lines a false key may serve to make a meaning. So of these broad observations I only expected a broad solution.
“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically”
Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist
Source: Dreams of a Final Theory