Quotes About Reasoning

To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them.

In the absence of any general inference from 'A is a potential X' to 'A has the rights of an X', we should not accept that a potential person should have the rights of a person, unless we can be given some specific reason why this should hold in this particular case.

In thinking about ethics, we should not hesitate to question ethical views that are almost universally accepted if we have reasons for thinking that they may not be as securely grounded as they appear to be.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

The founding fathers went out of their way to establish a clear "wall of separation" between religion and state, to quote Thomas Jefferson. They reasoned, as James Madison so cleverly articulated, that both religion and government exist in greater purity if kept apart.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?

Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.

L'immagine che abbiamo l'uno dell'altro. Strati e strati d'incomprensione. L'immagine che abbiamo di noi stessi. Vana. Presuntuosa. Completamente distorta. Ma noi tiriamo dritto e viviamo di queste immagini. «Lei è così, lui è così, io sono così. È andata così per questi motivi…» Basta.

Politics is people-and people aren't logical. I prefer logic. It's simpler.

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worst still, they appear to have a bigger bias blind spot, meaning they are less able to recognize the holes in their logic.

It must come from your father's side of the family, Allison informed her with severe disapproval. You never got that sort of dreary, plebeian logic from my genes, dear! Beowulfans' cognitive processes rely far more on the creative and intuitive manipulation of concepts without the drudgery of applying reason to them. Don't you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it that way? That's why I never indulge in such a vice.

logic, as the TFN knew, was often no more than a way of going wrong with confidence

logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.

But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?

You don't have to agree with my vote, but you need to at least understand how I came to my vote.

I have an analytical mind.

I'm a pretty analytical guy, all right?

There is one thing remarkable about women: they never reason about their blameworthy actions,—feeling carries them off their feet; even in their dissimulation there is an element of sincerity; and in women alone crime may exist without baseness, for it often happens that they do not know how it came about that they committed it.

When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.

Hay cosas absurdas que tienen toda la apariencia de un legítimo razonamiento:

I think the best general discussion of scientific rationality is W. H. Newton-Smith's The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)

Yet the replacement thesis faces an obvious, glaring problem. As Hilary Kornblith notes, psychology can tell us how we do arrive at our beliefs, but we can still ask, "Are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs?