Quotes About Counterexamples

The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness:

As these examples show, Freud's theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.

Fourth—and here's where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake. *Goldie drove the lake her minibus.