Latest Quotes Added to the Commens Dictionary

In my view, logic has three parts, 1^st the Elements which makes analysis of what one has to deal with; Arguments &c. 2^nd Critic, which examines the conditions of the validity of arguments, and 3^rd Methodeutic, which shows how any inquiry ought to be conducted.

In my view, logic has three parts, 1^st the Elements which makes analysis of what one has to deal with; Arguments &c. 2^nd Critic, which examines the conditions of the validity of arguments, and 3^rd Methodeutic, which shows how any inquiry ought to be conducted.

In my view, logic has three parts, 1^st the Elements which makes analysis of what one has to deal with; Arguments &c. 2^nd Critic, which examines the conditions of the validity of arguments, and 3^rd Methodeutic, which shows how any inquiry ought to be conducted.

Science is not a fixed, unchangeable body of propositions. After a thousand years the general face of science may be modified past recognition. Scientific hypotheses are questions put to nature. In the game of twenty questions no skilful player begins by guessing what he thinks most likely. He seeks to fix one feature at a time. Scientific research is a much more intricate business, and various considerations go to determining what is the best hypothesis to try.

“Dyalectica,” says the logical text-book of the middle ages, “est ars artium et scientia scientiarum, ad omnium aliarum scientiarum methodorum principia viam habens,” and although the logic of our day must naturally be utterly different from that of the Plantagenet epoch, yet this general conception that it is the art of devising methods of research, —the method of methods, — is the true and worthy idea of the science. Logic...

“Instinct” is nothing but the generalization of a certain kind of single voluntary responses of single animals to single stimuli, namely of those responses that have tendencies to produce similar ultimate (and usually beneficial) effects on the welfare of those animals or of their progeny, which effects, however, they can hardly be supposed to have divined and certainly not to have ascertained by reasoning.

…the word real was introduced as a technical word (first of law and then of logic) and was so little used before Scotus and so continually by him that it ought to be regarded as his word; and my ethics of terminology will not permit me to give it any other meaning than that it is that whose characters do not at all depend upon what any man or men think that they are. I have said (in 1892) that to say that anything is quite real is a postulate, much as...

Science is defined in the dictionaries as systematized knowledge. But considered as one of the elements of the life of civilization science is not so much characterized by knowledge as by a resolute desire to know. Science to be a live thing must be growing; and to grow it must be animated with the spirit of inquiry; and the most essential element of the spirit of inquiry is a swiftness to see that you have been in the wrong.

…a habit consists in the fact that man or a thing would usually behave in definite way upon any definite sort of occasion and is thus by definition general.

The whole discussion of the logical nature of the different kinds of possible signs makes up the first division of logic, or Speculative Grammar. The second division, Critic, discusses the relation of signs to their objects, that is, their truth. The third division, Methodeutic, discusses the relations of signs to their interpretants, that is, their knowledge-producing value.