What of the charge that formal logic privileges ‘linear’ thinking? This too is nonsense. Formal logic does not direct the course of anyone’s thoughts, any more than mathematics tells you what to count or measure. It is gloriously indifferent between propositions that arrive through speculation, imagination, sheer fancy, sober science, or anything else. All it tells you is whether there is a way in which all the propositions in a set, however arrived at, can be true together. But that can be a pearl beyond price.
