Quotes About Explanations

When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is "how did you end up there?" Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else's misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.

The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.

SUCCESS REQUIRES NO EXPLANATIONS FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS

I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why

This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations

We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

The manual is written in an authoritative tone as if it were the voice of God revealing indisputable truths, but in fact it fails to teach its readers a core principle of scientific thinking: the importance of examining and ruling out other possible explanations for a person's behavior before deciding which one is the most likely.

In economics, contingent, time- and context-bound theories may yield more useful explanations and predictions than timeless and universal generalizations based on ungrounded assumptions.

That makes three suicides without logical explanations. Now, for people like Fitzhugh and the senator, with their kind of financial base, there's counseling at the snap of a finger. Or in cases of terminal illness—physical or emotional—voluntary self-termination facilities. But they took themselves out in bloody and painful ways.

If you eliminate all possible explanations, then the impossible is the answer.

If you eliminated all possible explanations, then the impossible is the answer.

Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one.

Between them, the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations.

And while I still resist defaulting to conspiracist explanations, pieces of this story do look and swim and walk and quack an awful lot like ducks—that is, resemble a well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else.

In short—to overstate the point only slightly—because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.

No one ever thinks his way out of despair. He must be rescued by the "event" of love. Explanations usually drive a despairing one deeper into lostness or prove to be untrue by pretending to be complete.

Il complottismo è un campo elettivo per queste agenzie. Esse offrono a buon mercato un prodotto allettante: spiegazioni dei fatti che liberano dall'onere di pensare e che al tempo stesso danno la gratificante sensazione di essere parte di un ristretto nucleo di persone che hanno davvero capito. [...] L'interpretazione critica è per i cittadini, il complottismo è per i sudditi.

Yet the continual stream of tortuous explanations of what socialism means only serves to highlight that ideology's terminal condition. Chinese leaders have not been able to recognize what the rest of the world already knows: socialism, with or without "Chinese characteristics," does not work.

Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.