Quotes About Argument

In a sense the debate between Penrose and Hawking is a continuation of that earlier argument, with Penrose playing the role of Einstein and Hawking that of Bohr.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

There's nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument.

accidental shooting death, they argue, are just part of the price we pay for freedom ... and besides, that sort of thing would never happen to me ; I'm too cool-headed.

Love is a very compelling argument.

The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him.

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.

For progressives fascist is a conservative who is winning an argument.

That passage makes, clearly and for the first time, the crucial distinction between rejecting an argument for a conclusion and rejecting the conclusion itself. The art of criticism cannot thrive unless that distinction is grasped. (pp51)

analogies may be scientifically important; they may serve, psychologically, to illuminate a dry exposition or to dispel a puzzlement; and they may be useful, methodologically, in suggesting a synthesis or provoking a generalization. But they have no inferential status: argument 'from analogy' is one of the numerous species of bad argument. (pp 56)

skilled arguers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.

Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person's argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long

The author says we enlist reasons to convince others to join the direction of our instincts.

skilled arguers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views."50

When you refute a person's argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it's difficult-perhaps impossible-to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix.

people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly."22

I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger's syndrome. That would be an ad hominem argument, a logical error, and a mean thing to say.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment. We reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

If you fall asleep at the counsel table, the first thing you say when you wake up is, 'I object!