Quotes About Reasoning

I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can deduce an answer.

Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness.

I have always been the kid who's asked 'Why?' In my faith, you're just supposed to have faith. But I was always like 'why?'

The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.

The more you reason the less you create.

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

Just as thinking is the soul speaking to itself (Theaetetus 189e), forcing itself to articulate its reasons and exposing those reasons to evaluation as if to different aspects of its own self, so we enlarge our thinking by bringing others into the dialogue.

Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained.

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable.

Careful inference can be more reliable than 'actual observation', however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.

science cannot even make probability judgements on

We can't prove there are no fairies but that doesn't mean we think there's a 50:50 chance fairies exist.

Sterelny challenges us to explain 'how we can be simultaneously so smart and so dumb'.75

O fato de que bules em órbita e fadinhas do dente não podem ter sua inexistência comprovada não é considerado, por nenhuma pessoa racional, o tipo de fato que solucione um debate interessante. Ninguém se sente obrigado a comprovar a inexistência dos milhões de coisas fantásticas que uma imaginação fértil e brincalhona é capaz de sonhar.

but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don't realize that non-belief is even an option.

Az értelmes élet egy bolygón akkor éri el a nagykorúságot, amikor elsÅ' ízben dolgozza ki saját létének indoklását.

If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.

Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.