Quotes About Propositions

Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.)

Truth is about propositions. When it comes to determining truth, it is vital to understand the methods used by individuals in asserting propositions.

To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one's own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

Torn by dreams,By the terrible incantations of defeatsAnd by the fear that defeats and dreamsare one.The whole race is a poet that writes downThe eccentric propositions of its fate.

Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations.

Faith and science thus find themselves reconciled, not in the way of the scholastic, who claims to prove the reality of his dogmatic propositions by means of universal reason, but by the assertion of the overall oneness of the real that has no double or reflection.

Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions 'pseudo-propositions'; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.

meaningful propositions are limited to picturing states of affairs in the world, and value

Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

Whenever one or more components of a company's business model changes, new business models are created for supporting companies. The changes might involve niches served, new marketing angles or improved value propositions.

I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

It gives a fair hearing to those who dissent scientifically from its propositions—in fact, it bends over backward to be fair

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

But all propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.

Christian faith is not an irrational leap.Examined objectively, the claims of the Bible are rational propositions well supported by reason and evidence.

Our propositions are true if they have the same structure as the world. Truth is a correspondence through structure.

I then thought, and am still of the same opinion, that error, and not truth of any kind, is dangerous; that ill conclusions can only flow from false propositions; and that, to know whether any proposition be true or false, it is a preposterous method to examine it by its apparent consequences.

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.

Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.

How could there be truths totally independent of minds or persons?... How could the things that are in fact true or false—propositions, let's say—exist in serene and majestic independence of persons and their means of apprehension? How could there be propositions no one has ever so much as grasped or thought of?

My whole account of positive epistemic status, not just this example, owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.