Quotes About Reasoning

You can't litigate math.

I love math.

I'm left-brained, so I'm all about a mathematical approach to language. I've always been interested in that.

I believe only in the mathematics.

Maths is the language of science.

We think; therefore, we often talk rubbish.

The problem I have with schools is, people are taught, 'This is how you do this.' They're not taught about why you do this.

We're not too out there to educate people about any specific thing necessarily so much as we are to encourage critical and scientific thinking.

I can't argue my way out of a paper bag.

Know what you own, and know why you own it

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

right man to prepare the citizens of his country, who were facing disempowerment, for the benefits of the vita contemplativa. The transition to reflective existence was worth an error in reasoning: Cicero unhesitatingly created a lofty nimbus for the future Roman spectator by portraying Pythagoras making the many in the stadium into the few in study.

This approach shares an assumption, one dating from the ancient Greeks, that human reasoning can be a source of knowledge.

Who overrefines his argument brings himself to grief.

The world is sensitive to our touch. It has a kind of 'Zing!' that makes it fly off in ways that are not imaginable classically. The whole structure of quantum mechanics may be nothing more than the optimal method of reasoning and processing information in the light of such a fundamental (wonderful) sensitivity. — Chris Fuchs

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

John was not a logician, but a seer; not a reasoner, but a mystic; he does not argue, but assert; he arrives at conclusions with one bound, as by direct intuition.

Natural as such thinking may be, it is problematic. Lay out the tangled chain of reasoning in a straight line and you see this: "The probability that I would meet the love of my life was tiny. But it happened. So it was meant to be. Therefore the probability that it would happen was 100%." This is beyond dubious. It's incoherent. Logic and psycho-logic are in tension.

Snap judgments are sometimes essential. As Daniel Kahneman puts it, "System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence."13

Imagination without logic is worthless. It conceives uncritically; pursued for its own sake, it but deforms the mind. Logic by itself is only futile; without imagination it can only reprove the proven and so discover nothing.

The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.

Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.