Quotes About Rationality

Aufklärung des Verstands macht zwar klüger, aber nicht besser.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism , pursued to a certain point , bring men back to common sense

You can't rationally argue out what wasn't rationally argued in.

Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable. At

No conceptually regimented and normatively informed theory of mental disorder can be devised without taking philosophy of mind seriously and knowing something about this subject area of philosophy and of such topics as consciousness, Intentionality, personal identity, the mind/body problem and rationality.

A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial—the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality. It

It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many red state voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works.

The myths began with the Enlightenment, and the first one goes like this: The truth will set us free. If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they'll all reach the right conclusions. But we know from cognitive science that people do not think like that. People think in frames.

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

The traits the word 'childish' addresses are seen so often in adults that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do.

profesori nisu mogli da se odlu?e da me smatraju'umetnikom'. –On je veoma ozbiljan-govorili su- veoma vešt i uspeva u onome što naumi. Ali, hladan je kao led, u njegovim delima nema emocije, jer on nije li?nost. On je racionalan i, bez sumnje, intelektualac. Za umetnost treba imati srce!

If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

This is not a mystical adventure. You are not the protagonist. You're seeing and doing things which are having profound emotional effects on you. You're being irrational. You're not thinking things through, you're not working things out. You're going on mental arithmetic instead of paper arithmetic and you're going on gut instinct instead of worked, peer-reviewed results.This is not good science.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse.