Deductions

In the one instance,

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In the one instance, the dreamerloses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestionsuntilhe finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,… forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Edgar Allan Poe

You can\’t remember sex.

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You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your … Read more

Taxes are paid in

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Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, in tax-sold farms, and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain. Our workers may never see a tax bill, but they pay. They pay in deductions from … Read more

It is difficult to

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It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories. Frank Smith

When I began my

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When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the … Read more