George Boole Quotes on Truth
George Boole, the founder of modern symbolic logic, approached truth through the formal study of valid reasoning, and the quotes gathered here present that approach. For Boole logic is the science whose business it is to investigate the laws of valid reasoning, and his decisive insight was that the symbols of logic obey laws of operation as numbers do, allowing reasoning to be carried out as a kind of algebra. In this formal spirit he treated truth as a matter of internal consistency, the agreement of thought with itself, and extended his system to probable as well as certain inference. He cautioned, however, against a premature converse with abstractions that could sap the vigour of a young intellect. Most of these condensed formulations are marked as attributed. Drawn from his logical works, they present truth as something secured by the formal laws of valid thought.
Quotes
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Attributed to George Boole:
“The laws of thought are the laws of mathematics.”
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Attributed to George Boole:
“Logic is the science whose business it is to investigate the laws of valid reasoning.”
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Attributed to George Boole:
“Symbols obey laws of operation as numbers do.”
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Attributed to George Boole:
“Truth is the agreement of thought with itself.”
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Attributed to George Boole:
“The probability of a conclusion is determined by the probabilities of its premises.”
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“Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.”
A treatise on differential equations(1859) | p. vi; cited in: Quotations by George Boole , MacTutor History of Mathematics, August 2010.