But there’s one one thing about Star Trek for which I’ll never forgive Gene Roddenberry or Star Trek: “Logic”. As in, Mr. Spock saying “But that would not be logical.”.
The reason that this bugs me so much is because it’s taught a huge number of people that “logical” means the same thing as “reasonable”. Almost every time I hear anyone say that something is logical, they don’t mean that it’s logical—in fact, they mean something almost exactly opposite—that it seems correct based on intuition and common sense.
If you’re being strict about the definition, then saying that something is logical by itself is an almost meaningless statement. Because what it means for some statement to be logical is really that that statement is inferable from a set of axioms in some formal reasoning system. If you don’t know what formal system, and you don’t know what axioms, then the statement that something is logical is absolutely meaningless. And even if you do know what system and what axioms you’re talking about, the things that people often call “logical” are not things that are actually inferable from the axioms.
-- Mr. Spock is Not Logical