Mason Gaffney wrote:

>       So I do think we need to temper logic with observation, when making
>policy. It is true, as you state (not quoted above) that some statists and
>other control freaks (including corporate CEO's) use empirical studies to
>manipulate people. Alston Chase's recent book on *Harvard and the Unabomber*
>documents this at chilling length. That is not a sufficient reason, I
>submit, for the rest of us to deny ourselves the benefits of such studies
>for more worthy purposes.


I think there is a big mistake in trying to 
confound logic with the whole of reason. Everyone 
who acts, acts for a purpose and hence has a 
reason for his actions. But to say that the 
reason is arrived at by a chain of logical 
deductions is inaccurate. Humans act from a 
complex of hierarchically ordered desires, and 
actions generally appear to each actor as 
rational at the time the action is performed but 
may appear to another observer, even the same 
person at another time, as irrational.


John C. Medaille