A while back, I signed my email with the following quote:
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.--G. K. Chesterton
Jim raised the point with me, pointing out that it's a bit of a religious argument there. And at the time, I didn't have much of a defense. I was thinking about it just now, and realized that it depends on your timescale to a certain extent. Thinking of the human mind as a complex machine, are you using logic when you decide on Truth? Certainly at the lowest level, things are logically making sense - this molecule triggers that reaction and that reaction produces this other chemical which spreads and so forth, but that's certainly not the logic Chesterton refers to. I think my response would be that at some point, even in the most rigorous logical exercises, we make a deductive leap. This leap, if the thing we are leaping to is at all important (read: nontrivial) is quite likely (possibly required to be) not a direct result of logic at all, but a "gut" feeling that we later justify with logic. Perhaps?
