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Editorial

Thinking Straight

by Rick Lewis

Captain Kirk strode briskly onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise. “Mister Spock! Earlier, when I said that we’d make it through this asteroid field safely because lightening never strikes twice in the same place, and you said I was being illogical, what exactly did you mean by it?” Spock looked up from his antique copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and raising one quizzical eyebrow, replied, “Logic, Captain, is the general science of inference. Deductive logic, in which a conclusion follows from a set of premises, is distinguished from inductive logic, which studies the way in which premises may support a conclusion without entailing it...

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