Quotes About Interpretation

Namely, that for every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things (many of which I have quoted) which imply that genes are purposive. And

Don't mistake legibility for communication

Never mistake legibility for communication.

I have a liberal arts English degree, so I was brought up thinking that's what it was all about, and I had to learn that sometimes, or often times, art just is. It's not attempting at anything. It's not providing answers. I had to grow up a little bit before I got to that.

metrics often foster compliance with words rather than with intent.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.

People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.

The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.

Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.

Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.

Nearly two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher, Epictctus, stated that people are disturbed "not by things, but by the views we take of them.

Statistics can easily fool us if used incorrectly, or if we fail to take in the whole picture of what's going on. The situation is even worse when data are presented in a way that's deliberately misleading – as often happens in advertising and politics. Without resorting to outright lies, there are plenty of ways to distort data to create a false impression.

used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface' --meaning that there was nothing underneath.

We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are. Consider

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.

Good/bad explanation An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.

The things other people said or did would always give room to take offense, if you were of a mind to take offense. Therefore the fault wasn't in the other people.

You perceive and remember that to which you can relate. When you observe something aberrant, your tendency is to build a metaphor to explain what you didn't understand.

You say in your letter the historian writes the truth. Forgive me, I must disagree. The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on.