Word: logicall
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Diversity means uniformity. (If someone wants a "diverse" student body, say, that means he wants one in which everyone is more or less like him. This is only logical, because "minorities" tend to be in the majority now. Thus "equal opportunity" usually means "unequal," since some are more equal -- or...
Such stories pushed Goldfarb, an abstract mathematical logical theorist who has never held a permanent job outside Harvard University, to come out of the closet in the early 1980s, making him the first openly gay member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"I'm gripped by them," he says of the questions of logical theory he works to solve. He is "trying to think in most abstract ways about human cognition and human reason."
"I worry about questions like what is the nature of inference, and what kind of sense can we make of the foundation of mathematics," he says. At its most basic, he is explaining the foundation for logical thought.
One can either "go on with ordinary uncritical practices of gathering knowledge," or one can seek to explore how that knowledge fits into a logical framework and what precisely constitutes "knowledge," he says. It is this exploration to which Goldfarb is dedicated, whether or not society ever understands the answers...