| | Reason is not absolute. Reason is provisional because it must be tested by experience. Logic is absolute because it is invariant and independent of experience.
==> Is reason logic?
Logic is non-contradictory thinking, by Rand's definition.
Logically, "necessary and sufficient" is "equivalent to."
I was taking a class in boolean algebra during Hurricane Katrina. President Bush insisted that "our response was necessary and sufficient." I brought that up in class because his statement meant literally and logically, that in the absence of the hurricane, the federal response would have been just as bad as a hurricane. Imagine it: thousands of people showing up, trailers all over the place, National Guard troops; it would have been a disaster!
But is that reasonable? Is that a reasonable criticism of the President's statement?
Reason is the faculty that integrates in the information provided by the senses. If reason were (merely) logic inclusive-or if logic were (always) reasonable, then desktop computers would have consciousness.
There is more to reason than logic. Logic is a necessary condition of reason, but not logic alone is not sufficient. Take, for example, our good friends Penn & Teller, who make a living entertaining us with their perceptual ambiguities. Logically, things can pop into existence without cause: "let there be x, such that..." Reason tells us to look for the man behind the curtain.
Consider "stagflation." By the logic of Keynesian economics, if the government injects money into the economy, it is a stimulus. Reason -- which is grounded in experience -- tells us that there is more to this and warns us that the consequences will be a decrease in production.
Is it reasonable that people should fly?
You could prove to Aristotle that it is logically possible to fly -- start with Empedocles's experiments and in about a week, you could show Aristotle that it could be done. Constructing a flying machine in 300BC -- or even 1800 AD -- was unreasonable, i.e., empirically impossible, for lack of a host of technolgies that were preconditions to the construction of flying machines.
By logic -- Bernoulli's laws, etc. -- flying was always possible.
But it was unreasonable -- provisionally, not absolutely, impossible -- before 1900.
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