Quotes About Reasoning

It's just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we're in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

I don't just want to show how somebody might be wrong;I want to know why people believe the things they believe in the first place. I want to understand the mindset that would lead somebody toward the alt-right.

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.

Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day.

I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and [Anthony] Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy.

The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.

I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument.

You need your intelligence and your skepticism.

In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives.

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.

To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but "affirm" other people's way of life or even "celebrate" diversity in general. Like other demands for "sensitivity," this demand offers no reason—unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

It seems perverse to define intelligence as including rationality when no existing IQ test measures any such thing!

More intelligent people appear to reason better only when you tell them in advance what good thinking is!

Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.

Logic is what the devil likes most.

Multi oameni, cand incearca sa justifice de ce au sau nu au o anumita credinta, deseori au multe opinii in loc de motive.

But isn't it enough that I just don't want it?" "No," said Fiona. "It isn't enough." "Why not?" "Well, if that was enough, if just saying no and not giving a reason was enough, where would we be? It would just be chaos.

Faith, wrote Origen (185–245), perhaps the first great Christian theologian, is 'useful for the multitude', a means of teaching 'those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons'.

Rather than apply minutes of suspect reasoning, we can just ask the computer by making the change and running the tests.

It is an every-day experience that our emotions are never at the level of our reasoning.