Quotes About Reasoning

They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.

It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.

It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.

Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

El lógico (al Señor anciano): Aquí tiene un silogismo ejemplar. El gato tiene cuatro patas. Isidoro y Fricot tienen cada uno cuatro patas. Por lo tanto Isidoro y Fricot son gatos. El señor anciano (al Lógico): Mi perro también tiene cuatro patas. El lógico (al Señor anciano): Entonces es un gato.

I noted a second time appreciation for the author's making room for intuition in the sermon process. Most of us give lip service to the fact that preaching is an art as well as a science, but then we become afraid that someone will think we speak of preaching as an art as an excuse for ambiguity, sloppy thinking, and poor reasoning. In defense, we omit all art and artistry and proceed to offer the reader an adequate technology for framing and delivering the message.

It is an infirmity of our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our reasoning powers, and attribute to the objects of our likes and dislikes qualities they do not possess and effects they can not produce.

Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination

This tension between the instinctive animal and the reasoning human who discounts anything that doesn't fit into narrow sense categories is fascinating to me.

And you're sucking up all our oxygen in here for what reason?

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

ad hominem attack

A lógica é a mãe de todo o conhecimento.

You don't sit around looking for reasons to do the right thing; it's the bad decisions that require creative reasoning.

The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity.

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.

Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.

I wouldn't say that dittoheads, as a group, lack the ability to reason. It's just that whenever I run across one, he seems to be at a low ebb in reasoning skills.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.