
“Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.”
1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
Foreword to Teichmüller Theory
“Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.”
1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
Context: I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.
Source: Realistic models in probability (1968), p. 1
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 125.
the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.
Turing Award Lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969) http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html, in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2) (April 1970)
[Undecidability and intractability in theoretical physics, Physical Review Letters, 54, 8, 1985, 735–738, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.54.735, https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/undecidability-intractability-theoretical-physics.pdf]
Putnam as quoted in: Julian Baggini, Jeremy Stangroom (2005) What Philosophers Think. p. 233