In every work a reward added makes the pleasure twice as great.
Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.
The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.
Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.
To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.
If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.
Government shutdowns do not actually become what the term implies. Two-thirds of the government cannot shut down. We're only talking about the third of government that's discretionary spending, and even at that, nobody loses their jobs, and nobody loses their Thanksgiving turkey. The whole thing has resulted from the Republican Party thinking they bought the farm back in 1995.
Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).
In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’
When you have creative people, you have to let them do their thing. You have to resist the urge to be too efficient, you have to resist the urge to work to a certain budget and schedule - other than the fact that things have to end. It's harder work to produce this way but my philosophy is that you have to let it be creatively chaotic and let it find its place. When creative people are on to something, you know it and you have to allow it to happen. You can't set a schedule for that.