Quotes About Reasoning

The population of an inference is thus equivalent to the breadth or scope of an argument.

Every problem in quantum physics had to be first "solved" using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning.

Logic is the anatomy of thought.

Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.

There are some Men of one, some but of two Syllogisms, and no more; and others that can but advance one step farther.

In many cases it is not one series of consequences will serve the turn, but many different and opposite deductions must be examined and laid together, before a man can come to make a right judgment of the point in question. What then can be expected from men that neither see the want of any such kind of reasoning as this, nor, if they do, know they how to set about it, or could perform it?

People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other altertives.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense - from "Progress and it's Sustainability

Incidentally, common sense is not so common and is the highest praise we give to a chain of logical conclusions.

How is he who has never reasoned to be enabled in his turn to train his offspring otherwise than he himself was trained. Proud of sway and dominion, he gratifies every impulse of caprice, blindly commands while they blindly obey; and thus from one generation to another the world is peopled with slaves, and the human mind degraded from the station which God had given to it.

Remember your Plato, Maeve. 'If a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties, does away with the idea of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy his reasoning…

Like all Holmes's reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.

There is nothing so easily made offensive as good reasoning; and men of clear logical minds, if not gifted at the same time with tact, make more enemies than men with bad hearts and unsound understandings.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

finishing his final work on mechanics and physics, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences in 1638, four years before his death. Down to the end, Galileo protested that he was a better Aristotelian than his opponents because he believed in avoiding fallacies in reasoning, and because he believed "it is not possible that sensible experience is contrary to truth.

The classic deductive inference (actually taken from Aristotle's Categories) is "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." Usually a good deductive inference goes from greater generalities to lesser ones:

By contrast, inductive logic usually (though not always) goes from the lesser to the greater. "I have five friends who have white beards; all five are over fifty years of age; therefore all men with white beards are over fifty years of age.

Aristotle called these true deductive inferences syllogisms. All syllogisms follow the same basic structure as the "Socrates is mortal" example. Each contains two premises or assumptions (called major and minor) and the inescapable conclusion we have to draw from them.

Aristotle showed (or seemed to show) that by linking one valid syllogism to another regarding a single subject, such as biology or ethics or even the nature of God, one could build a conceptual chain of reasoning that would inevitably lead, link by link, from one set of necessary truths to another, all the way to the highest truths of all.

In effect, Aristotle's logic offered the possibility of creating a universally true science out of anything—or of deconstructing claims of being a science.