logical
- 1Sensible and reasonable; following from sound judgment about a situation.
Given the rising costs, closing the older factory was the logical decision.
Her plan sounded perfectly logical, so the team agreed to follow it.
Similarsensible, reasonable, rational, natural, obvious
Oppositeillogical, unreasonable, irrational, absurd
- 2In agreement with the principles of logic, reasoning correctly from one step to the next so the conclusion follows.
A logical argument guarantees its conclusion whenever its premises hold.
The detective built a logical chain of inferences from the available clues.
Similarvalid, sound, rational, coherent, reasoned
Oppositeillogical, fallacious, invalid, irrational
Note
The strict sense is judged by the rules of inference rather than by common sense. An argument either is logical or is not, so this use takes no comparative. What counts is that the conclusion follows from the premises, whether or not those premises are true. Where "more logical" appears, the word has moved to the everyday "sensible" meaning. Its learned near-synonym, sequacious, likewise stresses one step following another.
- 3Relating to logic, the formal study of valid reasoning, and to its rules and notation.
The course covered logical operators and truth tables.
Philosophers use a special set of logical symbols to write out their arguments.
- 4Relating to the conceptual structure or model of a system rather than its physical form or implementation.
Like an organizational chart showing who reports to whom, without describing the actual offices people sit in.
A single logical drive can span several physical hard disks.
Network architects map the logical topology before installing a single cable.
Similarvirtual, conceptual, abstract
Oppositephysical
Note
In computing, logical is always set against physical. Logical memory looks continuous to a program even when the operating system spreads it across RAM and hard disks. A logical drive is the structure a user addresses, not the hardware underneath. Noel Malcolm Morris's Computer graphics and CAD fundamentals (1986) warns that a program must restore the logical colors at the end. These are the colors as the program names them, not as the hardware produces them.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "logic" combined with the suffix "-al".