Quotes About Explanation

Unfortunately, Baillargeon (2008) is not aware of the epistemological commitments resulting from her theory. For example, Baillargeon does not address how her theory avoids the symbol-grounding problem (i.e., the problem of explaining how representative items can have meaning)

Sensory-motor intelligence aims at success and not at truth; it finds its satisfaction in the achievement of the practical aim pursued, and not in recognition (classification) or explanation. It is an intelligence only lived and not thought. (PDI, p. 238; cf. OI, p. 240)

Doctor Zinnowitz sent me to make the copies. I ought to explain, I am Flämmchen, the person he said he would send along," she said without ceremony. She had a dab of red lipstick in the center of her lips, dabbed on quite casually, merely because it was the fashion.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't.

It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away

Then you have to answer to your car owner, you have to answer to the sponsor, you have to answer to all these folks why you're not racing. But that's the only way it will ever stop.

Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.

To refrigerate a clock was an extremely violent act, not one I could explain to anyone.

The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always looking for the most polite explanation...

To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it

The News of the World no longer exists. How nice to realise that even the most offensive things will eventually require a footnote to explain what they were.

Nathan called all shiksas Maria--the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that.

exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less

You never told me what you saw in him, not convincingly.

Harry's parents present the two boys with a canister of Binaca. We laugh when it's clear that neither boy knows what it is. How would we explain it to them? That long ago, when you wanted your breath to be doused with mint, you'd pull out one of these slim metal tubes and spritz a little Binaca into your mouth. Whether you were covering up booze or covering up a more general sourness, you could rely on this hissing blast to do the trick.

Thoughts are endless and self-reinforcing, and they only breed more thoughts. Thoughts are merely rationalizations of the mind to try and explain the presence of the feeling.

He didn't explain how, but then again, no one does. They just say it's your patriotic duty and everyone kind of goes along with it.

I couldn't explain philosophy myself, and I doubt you could, either. Although it's ...' Her mother paused. 'I suppose it involves feeling something, and then using that feeling as a starting point for a train of thought. The feeling itself may be naïve, a lingering sense of wonder at something most people take for granted but you hold on to it, and think it through as far as you can. Does that sound right?

The other problem with Brother Ibrhm ad-Din Shukrallah, the biggest problem perhaps, was his great affection for tautology. Though he promised explanation, elucidation, and exposition, linguistically he put one in mind of a dog chasing its own tail: "Now there are many types of warfare . . . I will name a few. Chemical warfare is the warfare where them men kill each other chemically with warfare.