¶ Reductio ad Absurdum
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Index Entry
Reductio ad Absurdum:
“The deliberately nonstraight line of synergetics employs the mathematicians’ own invention for dealing with great dilemmas: the strategy of reductio ad absurdum. Having moments of great frustration, the mathematician learned to forsake looking for local logic; he learned to go in the opposite direction and deliberately to choose the most absurd. And then, by progressively eliminating the degrees of absurdity, he could work back to the not too absurd. In hunting terms, we call this quarrying his objective. Thus he is able at least to learn where his quarry is within a small area.”
¶ Citations
