> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sc

> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. -- George Orwell, letter to Noel Willmett (1944) [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwell-s-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwe... ] And here's a scary thought: for the purpose of ballistics etc. it's perfectly sufficient that some black box machine can think logically. That is, logically and based on true premises and sanity - because maybe you could say people like Hitler or Charles Manson were thinking logically based on flawed premises they made up on the spot. There is no such thing as "sound logic" in a vacuum, after all, it's always based on premises, and the "super hard" sciences, e.g. measuring how long a piece of rope is, say nothing about whether you should lynch people with that rope or or use it to build a swing set. The husband of Clara Immerwahr ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr - I like linking it that way because I simply adore that name (you could translate it as "evertrue"), and because she makes the contrast to Fritz Haber even bigger ) may have been a great scientist/engineer, but that doesn't say anything for or against his opinions about whom to feed and whom to let starve (seeing how the invention he was part if is feeding billions of people now), or whom to use toxic gas on. It's more or less orthogonal, I think. What I could agree with is "logically sound" being a placeholder for all sorts of things, intellectual honesty, reflection/debugging, honesty/transparency, reproducable facts, and so on, and all of that opposed to sophistry and marketing. But the premises play as big a role as the process IMHO, and crooked premises plus a logical process still equal a crooked outcome.