Quotes About Logic

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories. Among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves, and these "life narratives" are McAdams's third level of personality.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."26

The ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous.

Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.

La habilidad para razonar de manera normal combinada con la ausencia de emociones morales es una combinación peligrosa.

Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion does most of the work.

rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

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

Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is.

Human rationality depends on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.

And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.49

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can't be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.

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.

Truth and logic could serve as springboards for psychosis.

Some ideas actually are false, and at some point the process of checking establishes their falsehood so firmly that to proceed as if they might be true becomes ridiculous. For

That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief.

This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.

There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge," writes Popper.

took in the unfinished paintings. Strong and colorful, filled with promise and an inner logic that helps lift them above ordinary abstractions, so said the New York Times four years ago, the time of my last exhibition. So what had happened to all that promise?