Quotes About Rationality

System 2 thinking tries to follow proper rules of reasoning

In philosophical discussions of decision-making, an action is said to be instrumentally rational if it is a good way of achieving the goal that the agent is pursuing, whatever that goal might be. When assessing actions according to their instrumental rationality, we do not worry about where the goals come from or whether they are appropriate goals. We just ask whether the action is likely to achieve the outcome that the agent desires.

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

St. Thomas is as practical and plain and reasonable in ethics as Aristotle, or Confucius, or your uncle.

T]o scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God (I-II,19,5).

4) But only man knows consciously and rationally, and only man's loves can be conscious and rational and responsible through free will.

Humans are the lowest (least intelligent) of spirits and the highest (most intelligent) of animals. We are rational animals, incarnate minds, the smartest of animals and the stupidest of spirits:

We are by now well into the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment identified the search for knowledge as the highest form of human activity. It was a time for scientists to wipe the metaphysical dust from their eyes.

As Steve has said to me on more than one occasion: "The Chinese are the most rational people in the world. Until they aren't.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Whether particular people with the capacity to take an objective point of view actually do take this objective viewpoint into account when they act will depend on the strength of their desire to avoid inconsistency between the way they reason publicly and the way they act.

So the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient if not strictly accurate shorthand for the capacity to suffer and/or experience enjoyment) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?

In the former, Kant pictured man as a being capable of following a rational moral law, but also liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature. To act morally is thus always a struggle. Victory is to be won by the suppression of all desires except the feeling of reverence for the moral law, which leads us to do our duty for its own sake.

Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science.

secular parents are far from amoral. They may not raise their children religiously, but that does not mean that they raise them without values or ethical precepts. Some common, consistent moral principles secular parents impart to their children include valuing and obeying the Golden Rule, being environmentally conscious, developing empathy, cultivating independent thinking, and relying upon rational problem solving.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us.

it woke him up and allowed his dreams, his nocturnal desires and random wishes, to condense into a semblance of rationality.

Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can't see things like the secret commonwealth, it's because rationality's vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can't see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it's the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...

Politics is people-and people aren't logical. I prefer logic. It's simpler.

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but

Many Rationals are obsessed with speculative enquiry, so their speech tends to be laced with assumptions and presuppositions, probabilities and possibilities, postulates and premises, hypotheses and theorems.